Down Memory Lane

Yoga Made Hard

2012-01-24T13:08:00.000-06:00

Michael and I have been taking yoga classes off and on for about three years. On for five or six months, off for five or six months, then on again and so forth. The reasons we haven't been consistent has been lack of easy access to classes. Getting programs in our neighborhood has been spotty, with our yoga provider of choice, Texas Yoga Center, trying to establish a presence in Cypress and pulling out twice because of logistics problems or classes too small to support the venture.

For the last several months, we have had yoga at an outpost they set up at Natural Retreat and Spa about two miles from our house. You can't get much more convenient than that. The spa is what I would call a beauty shop, with the availability of massage services, facials, and other personal indulgences. Nowadays, that makes a beauty shop a spa. Perhaps my trip to Costa Rica and experiences at actual natural retreats with spas included has jaded me.

The people who work at the spa are very nice, though, and speak to us pleasantly when we come and go. They know our names. And they made over two small rooms into a large yoga room, which I appreciate. Taking classes at the outpost has been unpredictable. Who would be the teacher tonight? It could be any of several regulars or a completely unknown substitute. How many people would be there tonight? We might find a crowded room with eight or more people or it might just be Michael and I get a private lesson. The Texas Yoga Center decided that they couldn't live with the stress of these difficulties, so they pulled out the second time in eighteen months.

Their original location, where we started three years ago, is in Copperfield, our home community twenty years ago. It is perhaps eight miles away from us now, but the traffic between the two locations is terrible and it takes longer than it should to get there. We are often going to evening classes and by the time Michael gets home from work, we have dinner, and change into yoga clothes, we can't always get there on time. It just doesn't work very well for us and we want to be closer to home.

The spa people decided they would try to have their own yoga program, a good idea if for no other reason than they remodeled their shop and people were used to coming there. Unfortunately, they cut back classes to two evenings a week and no Saturdays. Taking classes two days apart with a five-day gap before the next class is not ideal, but the teacher they got, Jessica, is delightful and one of the best we've had, so we are trying to adapt. Jessica is quiet and encourages rather than pushes. She moves about the classes, adjusting poses, offering suggestions for more comfortable ways of getting into the same pose. She is very aware of different students' limitations and protects us from tackling poses that are too challenging.

Still, the Natural Retreat and Spa is still a beauty shop first. They cancelled this Monday's class because the stylists all went to a conference on Sunday and Monday, and no one wanted to come by and open up the shop that evening. In fact, the beauty shop is never open on Mondays, and the Monday classes are in constant jeopardy due to the inconvenience it causes for them.

Our yoga journey has progressed to the point where we feel deprived if we don't get classes on a regular basis, so Michael decided to try some other yoga studio. He searched a bit and found one three or four easy miles away and we tried it last night. Wow, it was the fanciest yoga studio I ever saw, occupying an entire very nice, very new home. (For non-locals, the Houston area doesn't believe in zoning, so if you are not in a planned community with deed restrictions, anything goes property-wise.)

The owner, Sharon, greeted us warmly. The interior had an open floor plan, displaying nice furnishing - professional, but cozy - and walls filled with shelves of every kind of Ayurvedic, alternative medicine, and yogic cultural items you could imagine. Sharon asked us to fill out new student forms, and then invited us on a tour of the establishment. (I should add, by way of clarification, that Michael had talked to her on the phone earlier in the day and told her about our various medical issues and limitations, including the fact that I have lupus.)

Sharon told us she practiced Ayurvedic medicine. She showed us her office, complete with a table for patients draped in an Indian print cloth. She showed us the kitchen, where green tea was available at all times and encouraged us to stay after class for tea and conversation with other students. She introduced us to four students sitting together and talking before class. She showed us another exam and treatment room for her practices of alternative medicine. Its walls were covered with bottles of herbs and pills neatly stacked on shelves. She took us down the hallway to another room that had, oddly, I thought, twin beds and regular bedroom furniture.

"This is for patients in detox," she said, adding that they offered a 21-day cleansing program. "Also, we have guest teachers who use it and sometimes our students just need a break from their home lives and they can come here to get away for a bit." Then, smooth as silk, she said, "You can detox here when you're ready. It is great for lupus."

The tour continued. What would have been a three-car garage was the yoga studio, very nicely equipped and full of students. We put our yoga mats on the shelves she indicated and continued the tour, seeing, on the opposite side of the house, rooms dedicated to massage and other types of personal care services such as color therapy and Reiki. As we walked back towards the yoga studio, Sharon said, "Today you may watch me to see what I am doing and after that you keep your eyes closed during class." Tour finally complete, we went back to the yoga studio to prepare for class while Sharon changed clothes.

Michael and I each use two mats when we do yoga. We learned almost immediately in our yoga adventure that old knees do not like hard floors and we found it difficult to tolerate the hands-and-knees work without some extra help. We also each had a foam mat, the type one uses for gardening, to use on particularly knee-unfriendly poses, like cat/cow stretches. As we rolled our double mats, an unknown person in the back of the room called out, "Look, two mats!"

Not knowing if I was being addressed or laughed at, I answered as cheerily as I could, "Old knees need two mats." After a brief titter, the students began talking to each other again and no one except Sharon spoke to us the rest of the evening. Sitting there on my mat, I noticed that as students arrived they went to the cupboard and picked up large bolsters and woven blankets. Not knowing why, I just watched. I figured Sharon would tell us what we needed to know.

That proved to be incorrect. The bolsters were put into use almost immediately, so I got up during the practice and retrieved one for myself and another for Michael. We knew many of the poses Sharon included in the practice. She flowed from one pose to another at a quick pace, did not move among us adjusting poses as we had been used to, and directed us to do a number poses I had never seen before or considered doing in my wildest dreams. Balancing on one leg is okay and I can do that fairly well. Holding the raised leg straight out in front is more difficult, but I gave it the good old college try. Folding the extended leg back to the body and laying it on the opposite thigh exceeded my abilities considerably. Bending the entire body over into a one-legged front fold sent me into a seated pose on my mat, waiting for reason to return to the room.

I couldn't see many other students, so I don't know how well they did on these things, but Sharon very easily and smoothly performed a series of yogic feats that simply defeated me. The culmination came when she had us extend from a seated lotus position - feet placed on top of the opposite thighs - and place the top of our heads on the floor. I am actually quite limber, so I could do that. Then she had us rock forward so we were on our hands, our knees and our heads, still in a lotus position. Next, the legs unfolded and the knees went to the elbows. I quit there, while Sharon went on to stand on her hands and head while her body balanced above her.

Thankfully, the session ended shortly thereafter. Sharon directed us into corpse pose - laid out on one's back, feet dropped to the side and arms alongside the body, palms up. It is the ultimate relaxation pose in yoga and at that moment, my sweaty, stressed body felt entirely corpse-like. She instructed us to cover ourselves. Ah, that was what the woven blankets were for. Not long after Sharon dimmed all the lights, I felt the soft caress of a blanket cover me from chest to toes. It felt nice.

When class was over, I looked around the shelves while Michael paid our fees. The merchandise included stones and crystals, prayer wheels, yoga mats, Ayurvedic soap, herbs, yoga clothing, and many other items related to yoga, Ayurveda, and alternative medicine. As soon as Michael had paid, we left. We were both quiet. I didn't want to find out that Michael loved the place, because I felt profoundly unsettled by it. He asked me what I thought; I bounced the question back to him. In the end, all I could think of to sum up my feelings was, "She's no Jessica."

When we arrived home five minutes later, I turned on my iPad to check email. I had some new messages, including one from Sharon. She welcomed me to yoga class and offered several other services available for purchase at her studio. "Look at this," I said to Michael. He looked and shrugged, replying, "Well, she is in business." The Natural Retreat and Spa is in business, too. And Texas Yoga Center is in business. I just never noticed it when I did business with them.

Quilting Moonglow

2012-01-17T14:13:00.000-06:00

Friday night I started quilting Moonglow, the veryelaborate, paper-pieced quilt that I started in a Block-of-the-Month class in2010. The top (which I displayed in an album on my Facebook page if you'd liketo look at it) gave me a severe approach-avoidance complex when I first saw it.

Beautifully designed, the blocks are a cross between themariner's compass and ancient drawings of the stars and sun. Each block seemedmore detailed and difficult than the last. I had never paper-pieced, a processby which one sews the fabric onto actual pieces of paper. I had never attemptedany quilt block as complicated as the simplest of these blocks. And, I hadnever seen such a beautiful quilt. I had to do it and I felt terrified at thesame time.

The teacher, Carrol Stewart, was also an unknown quantityto me, although I quickly discovered her strengths as a teacher and taskmaster.Carrol had impeccable quilting credentials and as a bonus was a whiz at nudgingrecalcitrant sewing machines into behaving. She had owned a quilt shop and soldsewing machines before her retirement and she had all the skills needed plus agreat personality for a teacher. I can just hear her saying, "Now, lookhere, darlin' ... " which indicated you were about to get a lesson thatincluded ripping out stitches.

Over a year's time, I learned my lessons fairly well andCarrol was often willing to sit and rip stitches for me while I re-seweddefects. She taught me how to miter borders and generally coaxed me along untilI had a beautiful, I-can't-believe-I-made-this, quilt top. With her help, Ifound the perfect backing for my quilt, then took everything home and put it ina drawer.

I told myself that I had other quilts to finish before Icould start this one, but the truth is that quilting it daunted me as much asconstructing it had in the first place. There was just so much to quilt. WheneverI looked at it, I saw the thousands of stitches I would have to sew in laboriouslyand I balked at even starting. Didn't I know the obvious that if you didn'tstart you would never finish? Well, of course, I did, but I had my excuses -other quilt projects to finish.

Nine months later, I had caught up on the projects thatwere ahead of Moonglow and I still didn't want to commit myself to handquilting it. For a time, I considered paying Carrol to machine quilt it for me.I had seen her work plenty of times and she did a marvelous job of machinequilting, whether a simple, computer-driven pattern or a complex, hand-guidedpattern. But I hand-quilted all my quilts. After all the work I put into makingMoonglow, would I be selling myself short to let someone else quilt it?

I considered machine quilting it myself, on my own littlesewing machine, not a top-of-the-line long-arm quilting machine like Carrolhad. I even took a class on machine quilting which helped to reduce my anxietyabout it, but which also taught me that I would need a tremendous amount ofpractice with machine quilting before I could do a job nearly good enough forMoonglow.

Two weeks ago, I finally took the plunge and purchased thewool batting that would make hand quilting a much more pleasant job becauseneedles glide through it so effortlessly. Then I spent an evening at Quilt TilYou Wilt making my quilt sandwich. This past Friday, I wrestled the firststitches into the quilt top. It is always difficult for me to get started withmy needle and thread. Quilting has a kind of rhythm and at the beginning, Idon't know the music I will be dancing to with the particular quilt in hand.

I spent several hours on Monday quilting with Alix and nowhave the first block 3/4th finished. I estimate it will take me 8 to 10 hoursper block to hand-quilt it. There are 25 blocks, plus a large border made ofseven different fabrics, so, if I work on it regularly, I should be able tofinish it in six months or so. I always underestimate the finishing, likeadding the binding, but I certainly will have it done by next Christmas.

Alix and Adam are getting Moonglow. For a long time, Ithought I couldn't give it away after doing so much work on it, but I am overthat now. There are other quilts to make and I can't keep all of them in ahouse with only two beds!

My Costa Rica

2012-01-10T16:15:00.019-06:00

What can one claim to know about a foreign country after a ten-day tour? A few place names. Ten days worth of climate. Cultural expressions as shown by public displays and decorations. Some of the wildlife. Some of the accommodations. Several of its people. It is not a comprehensive understanding of anything, except, perhaps, the discomfort of tour busses. Yet I feel that the vacation tour Michael and I took to Costa Rica over the Christmas holidays gave me something more profound than an assortment of facts or impressions.

I own a small piece of that lovely country now. I own a small piece of its verdant jungle, populated by creatures as familiar as the Houston Zoo, yet completely unknown to me. My first day in Tortuguero, a place you can reach only by boat or by airplane, our tour guides pointed out barely distinguishable animals in the trees that towered over us. Like the moose pictures my father took on every camping trip it seemed, there was something back there in the trees, but you could never prove it from the photographs.

The next morning the raucous screams of howler monkeys startled me from sleep at dawn and hustled me outside for a look. I did not find moose-picture monkeys that morning, I found MONKEYS in the trees right over my head. Monkeys that were kind of scary, busy with their own lives, and totally unimpressed with human beings. I own a piece of those monkeys now. I own a piece of their wildness, a piece of their self-absorption with the daily business of staying alive, and a piece of their loud, challenging howl at the world.

I own a small piece of the Caribbean people who live in Tortuguero. Not a piece of the old fellow bored by his duties at the cash register of the gift shop in that tiny town, but a piece of the young man who pushed the coconut cart through the village. The occasional coconut was an odd treat that my family enjoyed in North Dakota, so far from the thought of palm trees. Dad would pound a nail through the three little circles at the top of the coconut and pour the milk out for whoever was lucky enough to get it that day, then smash the hard shell with a hammer, letting us gnaw the white fruit off the pieces that resulted.

When I realized that the young man sold coconut milk from his cart, I went over immediately, clutching two dollar bills in my fist like a child. I really only wanted the coconut milk, the elusive sweetness I remembered from childhood, but the young man expected me to choose a flavoring for two dollars more. In my practically non-existent Spanish, I tried to tell him that the plain milk would suit me fine. Perhaps he understood me, perhaps not, but I understood his Spanish when he told me that I reminded him of his mother and that he wanted to add the strawberry flavoring to my coconut milk at no charge, an offer I graciously accepted. I own a piece of that young man's shy courtesy and generosity.

I own a small piece of the artisan crafts of Costa Rica. Not the mass-produced, made for tourists knick-knacks available in every shop we visited, but the handcrafted glass frogs and dragonflies offered at a restaurant where we ate lunch on one of our travel days. The woman artist melted and spun the glass from rods of varying colors, creating the tiny creatures as we watched that her son sold and packaged from a table nearby. I own a small piece of her artistic pride and satisfaction in conjuring such tiny beauties with her own creative hands.

I own a small piece of Costa Rica's much touted educational system. We did not visit a local school, as our itinerary said we might, because our trip coincided with summer vacation and school was out. Nevertheless, our tour guide, Aaron Salazar, demonstrated its efficacy every time he spoke to us about the natural world of Costa Rica. Aaron has three college degrees. One is in theology and one is in taxonomy, the study of scientific classification. (The third I never learned.)

Aaron did not share theological information with us, although his reverence for the natural world bespoke a deep, personal spirituality. However, he did explain complex layers of animal and plant relationships and symbioses. In fact, he explained some scientific principles better than any of my science teachers ever had. Aaron imbued the relationship between the three-toed sloth and the moth that lives parasitically on it with soap opera-like details. He illustrated species classification by building us a town with his words and creating neighborhoods, streets, and houses with many rooms to organize and define the occupants. Standing over a large anthill, he told us as much about the anteater as about the ants.

Aaron's lessons for us clearly exceeded anything he had learned from rote. It was an unanticipated bonus. I own a small part of Costa Rica's educational system, the part that trained this young man in science and taught him such good English one could scarcely call it a second language.

I claim ownership of a small part of Costa Rica, the part where Michael and I enjoyed each other's company without giving a thought to the details of travel. The part where I spent an entire day lounging poolside on a beach chair without thinking about how I looked in my bathing suit or feeling guilty about monopolizing a scarce commodity. The part with buffet tables groaning under the weight of delicious foods. The part where the server asked us, "Coffee or chocolat?" after every meal, delighting my non-coffee drinking self with plentiful and scrumptious hot cocoa. The part where we swung gently in hammocks while reading our Kindles. The part where we both received a long, relaxing massage with wonderfully scented oils and Enya playing in the background.

What can one claim to know about a foreign country after a ten-day tour? Enough to treat my experiences like treasure, to cherish the small pieces of Costa Rica I have stored in my heart.

By the way, Caravan Travel organized and supervised our wonderful trip to Costa Rica and I recommend them highly to anyone who wants a trouble-free tour experience.

Chocolate, Anyone?

2011-12-20T16:41:00.007-06:00

Is it possible to have too much chocolate? Most people would answer with an emphatic "No!" and I would have to agree with them. Oh, I know some people don't care for chocolate, and people who make chocolates can grow tired of them. Remember the famous I Love Lucy skit where she and Ethel got jobs in a candy factory? Lucy and Ethel did not end up big chocolate fans. As a general rule, though, choclate is a favorite treat and people always want more.

Ordinarily, I would want more, too, but at this moment, Michael and I have hit the chocolate saturation point and just aren't enthusiastic any longer. "How did this astonishing change of heart come about?" you ask. "Well," I answer, "it all started in October ..."

When I visited my mother in Montana at the end of October, she had just returned from a visit with my brother and sister-in-law, Bob and Lynn, in Bismarck, ND. Lynn is a pharmacist and Bob runs the Medicine Shop pharmacy they own in Mandan, ND. In addition, they own a soda fountain store and the candy-making business that came with it. Every year since they became candy tycoons, Bob and Lynn have made the kindly gesture of sending family members a box of Lindy Sue chocolates. They are delicious and much appreciated.

This year, Mother had the box of candy with her upon her return from Bismarck. A bit early for Christmas, but it's chocolate candy so who am I to quarrel? I dutifully brought the box back to Houston UNOPENED and set it aside for the holiday season. Michael and I finally opened the candy around Thanksgiving, feeling that it was officially Christmastime when Black Friday hit.

Inside, we found the usual assortment of luscious chocolates with a bonus: a layer of chocolate covered potato chips that tasted absolutely delicious. Bob and Lynn hit one out of the park this year! We were happy. We ate the chocolates sparingly so they would last until we left for our Christmas trip.

A week or so after Thanksgiving, we attended a wine and chocolate pairing event sponsored by the Washington University in St. Louis alumni group. The party cost $20 each, which was tending out of our entertainment budget, but we decided to be sports and do it anyway. Good choice as it turned out. The evening, at Chocolat du Monde in Rice Village, delivered the goods.

We started with sparkling wine and champagne truffles, then moved on through three other wine-chocolate partnerships, each one delicious. While we indulged - and the Chocolat du Monde staff were very generous with the wine and candy - we heard about fine chocolates, sampled the mouth-watering canapes, and checked out the candy in the display case and on the store shelves.

Everything looked so good. The candies on the shelves were priced. Their costs were moderate to high, in our opinion, ranging from $12 a pound to $18. More than we usually spent, but this special chocolate was worth it. The chocolates in the case, which we had been eating all evening, were not priced, but I expected them to be about the same.

"Let's get some candy for Christmas gifts," I suggested to Michael. He readily agreed. I particularly wanted to get some really good, liquored up chocolate covered cherries for Nick. I try to send him some C-C-Cs every Christmas, but last year he suggested I get him some with alcohol in the syrup. A novel idea which had never occurred to me. Perhaps this year I would.

"How much are the candies in the cases?" I inquired innocently.

"The Neuhaus are $60 per pound and the Leonidas are $45 per pound," the proprietor told me with a straight face, such a straight face that I didn't have to ask if he was joking.

OMG! I thought. Who pays $60 a pound for chocolate??

That pretty much shot down our plans to buy people candy for Christmas except Nick, for whom I purchased six Cerisse candies by Leonidas, which are brandied chocolate covered cherries individually wrapped. It is his major Christmas gift this year! (Okay, I did buy a small bag of dark chocolate-covered, salted caramel balls for Michael and I, too, but they were from a $13 a pound jar.)

Right before we left, Chocolat du Monde had a raffle and awarded several gifts of wine and chocolate. Michael had the good fortune to win a one pound box of the Neuhaus. Yes, we left with a $60 box of Belgian chocolates to add to the candy from Bob and Lynn.

Last Friday, the Houston Women Writer's Co-operative held its annual holiday party, sharing dinner and exchanging gifts. I received a lovely basket full of - three guesses and the first two don't count - chocolates! In this case, the chocolates were more diverse and included cookies and cocoa as well as actual chocolate candies, but the overall effect was the same. More chocolate!!

Earlier the same day, Michael's office had hosted a holiday luncheon and gift exchange. He came home with - guess - yes, another box of chocolates. This time the loot was Ferrero Rocher chocolates. Wow. We had a lot of chocolate in the house. And mostly a lot of unopened chocolate. We are going away for Christmas this year, so we won't even have a chance to share with guests.

Yesterday, the mail came late and during a pouring rainstorm. Ordinarily, I would have ignored it until the rain died down, but I had to flag down the mail carrier on her trip up the other side of our street. (She had forgotten to take the packages I had scheduled for pick up that day.) While I stood huddled under a practically useless umbrella, I picked up our soggy mail. We received the usual appeals for money, sales pitches, and a large mailing envelope from my brother Bob.

ANOTHER BOX OF CANDY!!!

Bob and Lynn sent this box with holiday greetings, so the candy I received in October apparently was not our Christmas candy. While I would never complain about receiving gifts of candy lest they be withheld in future years, Michael and I now do officially have too much chocolate. I guess we'll have to entertain more this year.

Anticipation

2011-12-13T11:16:00.003-06:00

At Christmas, a year ago, Michael and I had an epiphany: we were free at last. We no longer had children at home on Christmas morning. This is more significant than it might seem to casual observance. When we married, on December 21, 1976, I already had a child, Alexandra, who was two and a half. Our first Christmas together, four days later, focused primarily on her, on the wonderful, magical elements of wrapping paper and bows, stockings and their stuffers, and toys.

And that has been Christmas at the Devereux home for all the years since. Because I love Christmas, the elements of magic remained long after our children could have given them up. And we adopted Victoria when Alix and Nick were essentially grown, giving the magical a new lease on life. For thirty-three years, a child woke us up on Christmas morning, anxious to see what loot awaited under the tree.

Last year, our 34th together, we awoke late in a childless house. No one cared if we got out of bed. This is not to say we awoke to a home devoid of Christmas magic. Santa had come in the night, proved by the stockings brimming with stuffers, and our gifts, those opened with the kids the previous evening and those from each, other lay scattered under the tree.

As we celebrated, low-key and relaxed, the epiphany struck home. We could do anything we wanted at Christmas now that all three children were grown and gone. It was at that very moment that we conceived the idea of going on our dream trip to Costa Rica in 2011 to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary.

Michael and I discussed the idea on and off for a couple of months until a chance conversation with a friend over lunch revealed the fact that she and her husband, as well as two other couples we knew, had gone to Costa Rica the previous year on a wonderful tour they highly recommended.

The rest of that story is pretty straightforward. I told Michael about it, we did our research, and, by March, we had reservations for a 10-day Christmas-time tour to celebrate our wedding anniversary. Deposits were made, plane reservations were made, a Fodders Guide to Costa Rica was purchased, and we started getting excited.

The excitement has built in the last nine months, our trip anticipated like the birth of a child. We had many conversations about what we would see, where we would go, and what clothes we would need. We talked about finally using our passports, applied for several years ago in the hope of overseas travel. We talked about how to conserve luggage space so we could bring back gifts for our family. What didn't we talk about?

Now, the birth is imminent. On December 23, a mere ten days from now, we are boarding a plane for Miami, where we will board a plane for San Jose, Costa Rica. We will be leaving the country for a place that is not contiguous with the United States. We will be embarking on a trip we have talked about since George W. Bush got elected president the first time.

I have most of my Christmas shopping and wrapping done. Presents are in boxes waiting to be sealed and mailed across country. I am finishing up my Christmas cards and putting up a few Christmas decorations to give the place a bit of holiday cheer. Michael and I have a plan for making our traditional cookies. And underneath all this seasonal normalcy, is a buzz of excitement and thrill. Our trip is almost here!

In a perverse way, I would like time to stop right now, for this moment of anticipation to linger forever. In three weeks, our trip will be over. Yes, we will have memories and photographs, but the buzz will fade away. I love this buzz. I especially love the fact that Michael and I are sharing the buzz so intimately, as a kind of connubial bliss.

I know already that one result from this trip will be the planning of another trip or event of comparable magnitude. It is way too much fun to be a one-time deal.

What's Not to Love about Christmas?

2011-12-06T11:53:00.000-06:00

I love Christmas. This is not to say I am religious or even Christian. As a Unitarian Universalist, my relationship to Christ is not as Lord and Saviour, but rather as mentor and wise guide. I don't celebrate the birth of Christ as a religious event, but I love to join in on "Hark the Herald Angels Sing."

In part, my love of the trappings of Christmas is a reflection of my childhood, of every Christmas pageant I participated in at St. Mary's and Holy Family, the elementary schools I spent second through eighth grade attending. (By high school, at St. James, pageants had lost their inclusive nature and morphed into performances by the choir and band, leaving me behind in no uncertain terms.)

I sang religious Christmas carols at school and secular carols with the Girl Scouts on door-to-door caroling expeditions. Caroling, in the cold countries it developed in and the cold country I practiced it in, is quite a testament to the power of the season. Who decided that trudging through snow in bitter cold and sing at the neighbors' houses constituted fun? We used to get hot chocolate and cookies at the last house, but a lot of frosty toes and red noses preceded those treats.

And speaking of treats, how about the seemingly infinite variety of Christmas cookies? I grew up baking fancy cookies with my mother. We made marzipan cookies shaped like apples, pears, peas, strawberries, and oranges. We made thumbprint cookies with gumdrops pressed into their hot centers just before they came out of the oven. We made almond crescents, delicate, crisp cookies, moon-shaped and rolled in powdered sugar, which melted on your tongue when you bit into them. We made peanut blossoms, peanut butter cookies with a Hersey's kiss pressed into the center, a Reeses's peanut butter cup without the wrapping. We made cut-out sugar cookies, frosted and sprinkled to perfection. We made Spritz cookies, extruding them from a metal tube in the shapes of stars, Christmas trees, and wreaths.

Mother and I baked all these cookies and put them in tins, then into the freezer. And after the baking was finished for the day, we made chocolate chip cookies for the other kids, masking, in theory, the smells of the not-to-be-eaten Christmas cookies, thus protecting them from marauding. I say in theory because it didn't take a genius to know that Mother would be making Christmas cookies and it was certainly no secret that she froze them in tins in the big, basement chest freezer.

Years of filching from the freezer taught me, and I presume my siblings as well, to regard frozen cookies a delicacy. As an adult, I discovered the practicality of having tins of assorted, frozen cookies available for the unexpected guest or for an after dinner treat. Frozen cookies stayed fresh and thwarted the casual impulse to snack that can decimate a jar of cookies practically overnight.

The same principle applied to Girl Scout cookies, I found, which could be purchased in quantities and consumed over weeks instead of days. It astonished Michael the first time a stack of Girl Scout cookie boxes disappeared overnight. ("They're in the freezer!?!? Why are the Girl Scout cookies in the freezer?") I really wasn't hiding the cookies from him, simply storing them for later use. And if I was the only one who appreciated the sharp snap of biting into a frozen cookie, well, then, more power to me for having a broad skill set in cookie eating. (Adaptation being a human survival technique, it is true that all my loved ones eventually developed frozen cookie eating skills.)

Back to Christmas in all its glory. What isn't to love about it? On Christmas Eve, we opened gifts one at a time in order of age, piles and piles of gifts in a family of nine, and then attended midnight Mass. And on Christmas morning, we awoke to stockings stuffed with tangerines and apples, candy and other small treats, and gifts from Santa Claus. I love Christmas gifting and I love Santa Claus. He still visits my home, often bringing gifts that would be verboten from anyone else.

Michael understands that household appliances are not suitable gifts for a husband to get a wive, but Santa may gift the family with appliances all he wants. Parents may disapprove of the latest hot gift item, considering it over-rated, inappropriate, or just plain silly, but Santa can give such gifts regardless of their deficiencies. Santa even provides children with the sugar cereal and soda pop and candy their cruel parents deny them. Santa Claus is a powerful reason to love the Christmas season.

I haven't even started on Yule food. And where would I start? So much food, such lovely place settings, such fine, hand-crocheted tablecloths, a glass of champagne by every plate, even of the youngest child. We ate and ate on Christmas Eve afternoon and opened gifts when the dishes were all done, a great motivator to the women and girls working in the kitchen. Which is one Christmas tradition I haven't kept; everyone who eats helps clean up. No gender-based chores.

As a child, I only knew about the Christian celebrations that take place at that time of year. As I got older and met a more diverse group of people, I discovered Hanukkah, the Jewish celebration that coincides seasonally with Christmas. It has its own assortment of delicious foods, gifts, and rites, well worth investigating. I have had the pleasure of eating latkes, collecting gelt, and spinning dreidels. The idea of eight days of gifts is appealing, although my Jewish friends tell me that the gifts are not as elaborate and plentiful as in Christian celebrations.

I love Christmas. Saturday night I attended a Christmas party, the only one on my social calendar this year. I spent a charming evening at the home of a friend, surrounded by friends, eating delicious food prepared by friends, and drinking a variety of festive beverages. How much better could it get, the sharing and caring of the winter holidays? I may not be Christian, but I am Christmasian, and expect to be for the rest of my life.

I Have a Question

2011-11-29T11:32:00.001-06:00

I am a person who always has questions. I wonder who the missing link was, envisioning a hairy, stooped fellow who wakes up one morning and announces to his cave mates, "I've decided to do something with my life." I wonder who decided the order of the lights on traffic signals. Did a committee haggle over this - "Red, green, yellow!" "No, yellow, green, red!" "I still think we should use blue instead of green." - until one stalwart member stood up and pronounced, "Enough of this, we're going with green, yellow, red and that's final." And did we give people the green light before or after the invention of traffic signals?

Questions. How could there be nothing, as in, 'Before the Big Bang, there was nothing but a void.' For me, even a void somehow implies thingness. It has a name, it must be something. Ideas are intangible in the same way that nothingness is intangible - you can name it. The naming does not create the existence of the thing, but it calls up the memory of it. When I name a table, for example, I can touch it's surface in my brain, I can see the crumbs left from a meal, I can hear the scrape of chairs being pushed under it.

What do I imagine when I contemplate the void, the no-thing of the no-time before the Universe exploded into existence? My brain balks at the task. It wants to imagine something, needs to imagine something, because humans are, after all, the essential imaginers. Not to imagine the nothing seems impossible to me. My human brain keeps trying to bring up memories of nothingness, to feel it under my fingertips, to hear its missing sound waves, to see across it vast invisibility.

More questions. Are the billions of cells in our bodies really citizens of human-sized universes, having sprung from the nothingness before the sperm collided with the egg? Each cell seems so intent on its task, and the tasks themselves seem so complex, so improbable. Could all these bits of aliveness really perform all their duties without some kind of sentience? I imagine one cell among the teeming masses of cells, pondering the same questions I ponder. "Where do we come from? What existed before the Big Bang that created this universe of which I am a part?"

And more questions. If I had done what my parents wanted when I graduated from high school and attended the local university, what life would I be living today? I try to imagine myself being someone else, yet essentially me. I would probably have married and had children, because marriage and children are part of the expectations I have always had about my life. But what husband, what children? What would Alix and Nick look like if someone else was their father?

I imagine Alix and Nick in different housings, the same people but with different skin color, or hair color, or eye color, but that's not how it would be, is it? My Alix and my Nick wouldn't be at all, other someones would fill my life, if there even were children populating my other imagined life. Perhaps in my different outcome, I would marry a man who was sterile, or I would miscarry every pregnancy, or I would abandon my husband and children, leave them behind.

In books and movies that tackle these questions, the lives we might have lived are often portrayed as parallel universes where things are just slightly askew, where a small change has small repercussions. But why would that be so? Why wouldn't a small change have a giant repercussion, make an alternate life that bears not the least resemblance to the actual life we live?

I love these questions. I love giving in to the absolute impossibility of following a metaphysical question to its conclusion, but trying to follow it anyway. What if we discovered the secrets of psychic phenomenon and everyone could participate in ESP and telepathy and telekinesis? Impossible, you say? But consider sound waves, consider explaining sound waves and radios or telegraphy to someone in the tenth century.

"There are these invisible waves, like the waves of the ocean, and they are continually emanating from everyone and everything that makes noise. And if you build a machine that can capture these sound waves and transform the invisible waves back into noise, then you can hear things from another village, or another country, or another continent." And the people you shared this insight with would consider you a lunatic or heretic or witch, none of which you'd want to be considered in the tenth century.

So, what if psychic phenomenon are just another kind of wave, waves we haven't discovered yet? What if the mechanism to decipher them exists in the structures of our brains, but most of us just don't know how to use those structures. If that were the case, then those few of us who were naturally inclined to pick up the psy-waves would be actually psychic, not loony or frauds or misguided.

I had an intensely psychic experience when I was sixteen, something so profoundly real and frightening that describing it to other people brings tears to my eyes 45 years later. How do I explain that experience in a rational world where ESP is bunk? I don't explain it, of course, it becomes another question for me to ponder.

Did I tell you I loved questions? I once asked my husband something like, "If I died in a car crash and my face was disfigured, how would you identify my body?" He did not respond well to this question. What I really wanted to know was this: do you know my body well enough to identify the scars and small anomalies I have accumulated in my life?

For many years, Michael became irate, and frustrated, and put out at many of the questions I posed. He had a moment of insight a decade or so ago, a moment he remembers with fondness and even relief. Michael has told me he suddenly realized that I wasn't necessarily looking for an answer to my questions, but that I just enjoyed playing with the questions. Bravo, Michael. It is not the answers, but the questions that I love. I will admit, though, that when I think of Heaven, of life after death, I envision a place where the actual true answer to every question I have ever asked or ever could ask is available, an infinite Wikipedia where no one has fudged or lied or misunderstood, and all the explanations can be counted on to be absolutely correct. Now, that would be Heaven.

His Scruffy-ness

2011-11-22T11:52:00.002-06:00

It feels like it's time for a cat update. In October, we officially adopted Scruffy, the tuxedo tomcat who had been begging to come into our house for months. Adopting him involved two trips to the vet's office, one for a check-up and shots, the other for a neutering procedure. That done, we began introducing him to our other cats.

Smudge, our alpha cat and also a tuxedo, did not like Scruffy one bit. Aside from the fact that they are both black and white with that distinctive "I'm dressed for a gala" look, the two have nothing in common. Scruffy is burly and, since he wasn't neutered until he was almost 2, has the full- faced jowly look that tomcats get. Smudge, on the other hand, is sleek and slender jawed.

Scruffy can be aggressive with our other cats. For the first several weeks of shared space, first Smudge, then Scruffy, received slashed noses. Smudge growls whenever Scruffy comes near, a deep-throated, rumbling that emanates from deep within his chest. Scruffy has stopped chasing Smudge and Smudge leaves the room if Scruffy shows up.

With Baby and Frankie, the dynamics are a little different. Frankie is definitely a lover, not a fighter, and he avoids Scruffy whenever possible, to the point of skipping nightly treats if the catmosphere is too tense. Frankie has always buddied up with Smudge in a pleasant, deferential way and he has always rough-housed with Baby in the big, overgrown kid kind of way. That remains the same, although Frankie seems edgier with Scruffy inside.

Baby is the only one who approaches Scruffy with any sort of camaraderie. They nose bump and butt sniff in friendly cat fashion. Occasionally Scruffy rubs up against Baby like he's looking for a friend, yet he also chases Baby around the house. This alarmed me at first, but now I've decided that it is playful rather than aggressive, so I ignore it.

For a while, I tried to intervene every time Scruffy got bossy or mean with my house cats. The funniest thing happened though. When I yelled at Scruff to stop or no-noed him in my tough voice, I scared the other cats more than I scared him. Occasionally trying to stop a stand-off resulted in a fight, because when I would startle the cats, one of mine would inevitably run, and Scruffy would then attack.

I quickly learned to leave them alone to sort things out, operating on the same principals that I used in childrearing. Things are quieter now days, with less in your face behavior by Scruffy and a little more tolerance by the house cats. Scruffy insists on being an indoor-outdoor cat, something we haven't had in 20 years, but it works well to give Smudge, Frankie, and Baby some relief from the changes he has wrought in our cat dominance hierarchy.

The downside of that is a increasing interest by the house cats in the outdoors. They want to see where Scruffy is going when he leaves. Last night, Smudge dashed into our bathroom as soon as I shut the door on Scruff, trying to get up on the windowsill (which isn't big enough for him) to check out the backyard. A few days earlier, Baby actually made a break when I held the front door open for Scruffy. I followed him, alarmed, and found him sitting on the front terrace looking bewildered. He advanced and retreated on several areas of the garden before dashing back inside, apparently overwhelmed by the sights and smells of his childhood territory.

I need to collar Scruffy and put his rabies tags on him so that he is protected from the cat police, although, if the feral colony is any indication, there actually aren't any cat police where I live.

Michael and I both intended for Scruffy to be his cat. That isn't working out as well as we hoped, although I am doing my part by ignoring him most of the time and petting him half-heartedly the rest of the time. Michael lavishes him with attention and, if Scruff is as smart as I think he is, he will figure out that the food and the love do NOT come from the same hands.

Scruffy would be happier in a one-cat family and we would be willing to give him up, so if you'd like a nice cat who isn't much trouble and who loves to be petted, let me know. Scruffy might be meant for you!

McMenamins Kennedy School Hotel

2011-11-15T10:43:00.005-06:00

I spent a long weekend at McMenamins Kennedy School Hotel recently, a bit of whimsy that I initially thought about last year, when we went to Portland for our first visit with Michael's son, MG, and his family. The hotel popped up on a Google search of Portland hotels and it looked interesting, a hotel in a school with a salt-water soaking pool. Last year, however, they were booked for some of the nights we needed and I put us in the Doubletree instead. (Gotta love those cookies!!)

This year, I determined to get into the Kennedy School and I booked early. Michael wanted to go to a hotel closer to MG et al, but the Kennedy School just appealed to me and I talked him into it. I was, therefore, the one on the hook when we arrived at the hotel and were underwhelmed by our first impression.

In fairness, we arrived late - two hours later by Houston time than it was in Portland - tired, and hungry. Our room, Thumbelina, had the vaultingly high ceilings of an old elementary school, a wall of windows at least eight feet tall, and a small space heater to combat the icy atmosphere. We put down our suitcases, jacked the heater up to high heat and max blower, and went to dinner.

Along the way to the restaurant, we looked out the window to get a glimpse of the saltwater soaking pool that had captured my interest online. It was outdoors, a fact that I knew but had not, until that moment, realized meant outside in the cold. And, because it was closed, it was swathed in plastic insulating tarps, making it look as uninviting as possible. What have I done? I wondered. This place is going to be awful.

The hamburger I had in the restaurant tasted great and the roaring fire in the adjacent courtyard looked inviting, but we were still cold and apprehensive. Walking back to Thumbelina, we noticed a plethora of artwork on the walls and signs pointing the way to the Honors Bar, the Detention Bar, and the Boiler Room Bar. There were quite a few people in the hallways and the premises looked very big and spread out, which, in fact, they were.

Unfortunately, Thumbelina had not warmed up appreciably in our absence. I did take a minute to notice the welcome sign written on the chalkboard, the lines from the story of Thumbelina inscribed on the wall, and the mural of leaves sprouting and spreading around the top of the room.

The chalkboard ranged across one entire wall. The headboard of the bed appeared to be an antique that may have started life as a door, the storage in the room consisted of a wardrobe and two bedside tables. The room offered a table and chair as a desk and a comfortable Victorian sofa for seating. Period pillows rested on the sofa and the bed.

We took care of personal necessities in a rather unimpressive bathroom, outfitted with a pedestal sink, a small, square shower, and two shelves to store our toiletries. The only decoration consisted of Thumbelina's leaves invading the bathroom walls like kudzu. Having done everything possible to delay undressing in our Arctic room, we gave in and got ready for bed. As I pulled my slinky, satiny nightgown over my head, I wondered why I hadn't thought to bring flannel jammies.

Day two began somewhat better because, when we woke up, the room actually felt warm. We had breakfast in the Courtyard Restaurant, which Michael enjoyed and I did not. I had muesli, which tasted okay, but the waiter served my steamer lukewarm. In case you aren't familiar with them, a steamer is frothed, flavored, steamed milk, a latte for people who don't like coffee. (I got a lukewarm steamer with a deeply frothed top in a latte cup on Friday and a piping hot steamer with no froth in a glass on Saturday. Call me picky, but neither one made me happy.)

After breakfast, we decided, with some trepidation, to try the saltwater spa. When we arrived at the changing room and got ready, I wondered what the heck we were doing. Walking out the door to the atrium produced chills on every square inch of my body, but, oh, the water was heaven! Soaking in that hot water, watching the steam rise lazily from its surface, occasionally wafted one way or the other by a stray breeze, and admiring the lush greenery, which included banana trees, I felt absolute contentment. This is why I came here, I thought, this is perfect.

The Kennedy School's place in its community unfolded for us when a play group of toddlers and parents began to assemble in the pool. They were not rowdy or unruly; perhaps something about the hot saltwater relaxed and soothed everyone as much as it did me, and we shared the pool contentedly until Michael and I felt ready to leave.

Over the four days we spent at the Kennedy School, I came to appreciate the atmosphere of community it fostered. The school auditorium had become a movie theater which was sold out every time we tried to see a movie. (The lesson there is to plan ahead, because guests can attend movies for free. Outsiders have to pay $5.00.)

The two-story Boiler Room Bar has fixtures and railings made from parts of old mechanical heating plants and a cute, little, waist-high, open-topped elevator to get disabled visitors downstairs. The place had a crowd every time we walked by. The Honors Bar, by comparison, fit into what had probably been a janitor's closet and had no customers when we visited. We did not ever get to the Detention Bar, but I imagine it had a bigger population than the Honors Bar.

Having stayed at the Kennedy School Hotel once, I have satisfied my curiosity sufficiently and may never stay there again. But I definitely recommend it to others. Just remember to pack warm pjs for the first night if you visit during cold weather, and plan to get your steamer fix at a nearby Starbucks instead of the Courtyard Restaurant.

Repurposing old buildings into something productive and community-building is a feat that I wish Houston businesses would emulate. Our wonderful Alabama Bookstore, an old-time movie theater turned into a Barnes and Noble bookstore for many years, might still be operating instead of facing a wrecking ball if Houston took renewal as seriously as Portland does. McMenamins would be a good source of information about conversions of old properties because they have successfully converted several in Portland and its surrounds. Hey, Houston developers, check them out!!.

Travelin' Times

2011-11-04T17:56:00.006-05:00

2011 has been a year of traveling times for me. In February, I went to Omaha, where my brother Mark and sister-in-law Judy live, to visit while my mother stayed at their home. The cold weather and snow didn't bother me too much, but they did make me happy to live in Houston, where really cold days are rare and snow even rarer. We spent most of our time in quilt-talk and quiltwork, since Mother, Judy, and I are all quilters. And we spent time with extended family, too, including the energetic young sons of my niece Jenny.

In May, Michael and I traveled to Brooklyn to spent a long weekend with our son, Nick. We had the pleasure of meeting his special friend, Kate and revisiting a college friend of mine, Greg. Our days were filled with simple, but satisfying activities. We spent a morning at the Cloisters, a place I've wanted to visit sine the first time it figured in a novel I read. We walked across Central Park and to the MET, then cabbed our way to Times Square for a meet-up that couldn't have been more surprising - my niece Leslie, from Wisconsin and her husband were also visiting New York City that weekend. What are the odds? We also saw the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, the Brooklyn Bridge, and spent lots of time walking the Park Slope area of Brooklyn. Discoveries there were primarily culinary and delicious, most notably The Chocolate Room. I had the best dark chocolate sorbet there imaginable.

Two weeks later, we jetted off to Huntington Beach, CA for Luisa and Derek's wedding. The wedding itself was a delightful harbor cruise and dance party that lasted for hours, thank you L&D, but the weekend offered ample activities for quiet old folks like us. Beach walks, exploring Huntington Beach, drinks and meals with other wedding guests, and a spectacular dinner at Rockin Baja Coastal Cantina in Newport Beach. They served the best seafood dinner I have ever eaten in a tin bucket and, when the food finally ran out, I wanted to put my head in the bucket and lick the sides!

In July, we drove to Grapevine, Texas for the Mayborn Literary Non-Fiction Conference, an annual event that feeds the body and the intellect. We listened to good writers and great writers talk about their craft and bought book after book, providing ourselves with lots of wonderful fall reading material. Most recently, I finished The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman. Excellent!!

In October, I flew to Helena, Montana by myself to visit my Mother and the large contingent of extended family I have there. Mother and I had a lovely time, mostly visiting with each other and being entertained by the great-grandchildren who seemed to be everywhere. We took a side trip to the Archie Bray Foundation where extraordinary potters pursue their passion and the gardens are littered with pottery "libraries." We also drove to Bozeman for another family visit. Altogether, I have eight adult relatives in Helena and eleven child relatives, making it the single most populous locale for descendants of my parents!

Two days after I returned from Helena, Michael and I left again, for Portland, this time to see son MG, daughter-in-law Shannon, and grand kids Olivia and Mackenzie. We're staying at the fabulous, funky Kennedy School Hotel. It has a heated, outdoor, salt water soaking pool that we braved this morning despite chilly weather. Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous! Steamy clouds drifted overhead as we sank into the warm embrace of the pool. We wondered if anyone else would try the pool out and discovered that it is popular meet-up spot for hotel guests and neighbor folk, too. If my bathing suit weren't still wet and cold, I'd go back now. Exploring the neighborhood this afternoon, we found the best gyros either of us has ever eaten, and we have eaten gyros in a lot of different cities, at a restaurant call The Blue Olive. Retail explorations took us to Monograph Bookwerks, a fine art books and objects store, where we found a lovely book on Wabi-Sabi, and to Six Days Art Co-op, where we saw many intriguing and beautiful art pieces, although we bought only two items (for gifts, so sshhhhh!).

Tonight the Portland Devereuxs join us for dinner and together we plot the rest of our weekend. Can't wait! And it is also hard to wait for the BIG trip in December, when we go to Costa Rica to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary. Like I said, 2011 has been travelin' times for me. I wonder how 2012 can possibly compete!

Rocky Raccoon

2011-08-12T00:14:00.033-05:00

We have seen the raccoon in our backyard twice before, although the evidence of his visits appear more regularly. Until he showed up, I didn't know that raccoons were so big, bigger than Scottie, the terrier we used to have, and burly, too. The last time we saw Rocky, it turned into an inadvertent game of tag.

Michael went out to turn on the sprinklers, not knowing that Rocky was on the patio. There was a momentary stand-off while they sized each other up and both considered options. Then Michael decided to get on with his task. Rocky didn't run away; he would sprint three or four feet ahead, then stop to check Michael's whereabouts. Unfortunately for both of them, Rocky's evasive maneuvers went straight towards the backyard faucet, exactly where Michael was going. When Michael got there, Rocky turned around and started his little sprints back towards the patio and our back door. Again, exactly where Michael was headed after turning the water on. There was a moment when I wasn't sure which one would come in the house.

Tonight, things took a different turn. We arrived home about 9 PM and Michael happened to flip on the patio light and glance out. "Lane," he called out, "you have to see this." I hurried to the living room windows, but I could have taken my time. There stood Rocky, hovering over a cat food dish and giving Michael a stare that looked threatening even from five feet away and through glass. After a moment, he turned his baleful eyes back to the subject at hand - cat food.

Just that morning, I had re-engineered the cat food dishes on our patio. Ants had begun invading the two containers, roiling over the food in such numbers that the kibble looked alive. The feral cats hadn't been eating much and I thought the ants were why. I tried putting the dishes up on lawn chairs, but guess what? Ants can climb plastic chairs. My next idea was a water barrier.

I used two cake pans, filled them with water, and set the cat feeders inside. It worked like a charm against ants, providing the cats with food that wouldn't bite back, but it also appealed to Rocky. As we watched, he scooped up kibble in first one hand, then the other, stuffing the food into his mouth greedily, perhaps afraid that we would come outside and chase him away. I say 'hands' because it looked so human, the way his paws powered towards his mouth one after the other. Just think of a movie where a ravenous person falls on a table of food and inhales it one handful after the other. That was our Rocky.

After a few minutes, he seemed to relax; obviously, we weren't charging out at him. In his more leisurely eating style, Rocky scooped up kibble with his hands held together monkishly, then dipped it into the moat of water surrounding the dishes. I knew from textbooks that raccoons washed their food, but kibble? Really?

Inevitably, the kibble escaped into the water whenever Rocky dunked it in and then he would plunge his snout under the water like a child in a shaggy coat dunking for apples. Periodically, he would look up at us with a quizzical eye. Is it really supposed to be this hard? I could almost hear him say.

While Rocky chowed down on the wet cat food, Michael and I went looking for cameras to take his picture, although the photos didn't turn out well through glass and in poor lighting. While trying to take a picture, Michael noticed something else on the patio.

"There's a cat out there," he told me. "Look behind the table." Sure enough, a cat was stretched out in pose of blissful sleep. "That's Blackie!" I said. Blackie, who we think is Baby's dad, is a homely thing. His coat has brown highlights, giving him a muddy look, and his big, jowly tomcat head just doesn't fit his long, thin body. He might might not be a pretty boy, but he was smart, the only one of our regulars we hadn't been able to trap for neutering.

"Oh, Michael, look at him. He's dead. The raccoon killed Blackie!" I knew that no cat would lounge so casually three feet away from a raccoon, and Rocky was that close to him. The raccoon stayed at the first feeding dish a long time, and Blackie never moved. When he had had enough of that one, he repeated his performance at the second one. When he had had enough kibble, he strolled over to the big dish of drinking water and thoroughly washed his hands and face, then strolled into the night without a backward glance at us or at Blackie.

"What are we going to do about Blackie," I asked from the kitchen. "Well, nothing tonight, that's for sure," Michael responded. "I'm not dealing with a dead cat now." "So, what then? I'm supposed to deal with it tomorrow after you go to work? I can't do that," I shot back. There was a long pause. "Neither one of us is going to deal with it," Michael said, "Blackie just got up!"

I ran to the window. There he was, calmly making a snack of the kibble Rockie had left behind. That Blackie is one smooth operator, that's all I can say. Or maybe Rocky and Blackie had already come to an accommodation, one rogue to another.

What a mess I had to clean up the next day; kibble really doesn't hold up well in water. It's been a couple days since Rocky put on his show for us. We haven't seen him and I haven't found any pans of kibble goo on the patio. Tonight I saw Little Mom, Baby's mother, eating daintily from an ant-free dish of cat chow. Mission accomplished for me.

Ciao

The Doorstop

2011-08-08T22:19:00.001-05:00

On the Trail of a Doorstop

Today, one of my cats brought the doorstop from my studio all the way across the house and deposited it on my bed. Made of heavy brown rubber, it is about four inches long, two inches high at the tall end, and an inch-and-a-half wide. DOORSTOP is emblazoned down its slope. This an industrial strength item which one of my cats picked up with his teeth and carried 30 feet or so.

I use the masculine pronoun because our only female cat, Trixie, is 17 and long past any activities except eating and sleeping. Of the three boys, Smudge, Frankie, and Baby, either Frankie or Baby is the likely culprit. Or should I say hero? For whichever one it is surely thinks that he vanquished a worthy opponent and he laid it on the bed in triumph.

I leave out Smudge, a well-muscled three-year-old tuxedo cat with a daub of black on his otherwise very pink nose, because he is the alpha cat and does not need to prove anything to anyone. And he apparently does not want to take any chances with his formal attire; he reigns elegantly over the premises and rarely engages the other two boys in play.

Smudge has dibs on me and likes to recline on my chest, where he rumbles deep, revved up purrs while I rub my chin on his head and cuddle him. This began when he was a sick kitten that I rescued after his feral mother abandoned him. A kitten on my chest compares in no way to a nearly-20 pound cat in the same place. By all descriptions, his snuggles closely resemble the medieval practice of pressing someone to death by piling large stones on their chest until they suffocate. I have never mentioned this to Smudge.

Frankie is Smudge's half-brother from a subsequent feral litter. He has not acclimated to people as well as Smudge, but he would like to overcome his fears. Not too long ago, the Houston Chronicle had a cat story that featured a photograph of a cream-colored, lightly striped Maine Coon cat. It looked like Frankie's twin. Their mother, known to us affectionately as Old Mom, has the same long, lightly striped fur in a styIish gray color. She has never let us close enough to know whether or not her coat is triple thick, soft, and silky, like Frankie's, or whether she has long tufts of fur growing between the pads of her feet, like Frankie does, but my bet is that she contributed the Maine Coon in his genes.

Frankie, who is two, likes me to brush him - as long as I stroke slowly and make no sudden moves. He likes one-handed petting, but becomes alarmed and bolts when there are two hands involved. Or a plastic bag swishes. Or someone speaks loudly. Or gets out of their chair. Or walks near his bowl while he is eating. What Frankie does like is to play with Baby, the youngest cat in our family at a year old.

Baby is a nephew of Smudge's and Frankie's. His mother was in the very first litter Old Mom produced. We call her New Mom, although neither of them will be moms agaIn because we trapped them, and a few other feral cats we feed, and had them all neutered. New Mom is even warier than Old Mom and taught Baby to be as well. He would bolt if he saw us through the window and his gray tabby top on a white bottom made him hard to see, but I kept as close an eye as I could on him. As soon as he started eating kibble, I began my cat whispering and, in a few weeks, coaxed Baby into the house.

We never intended to keep him and therefore refused to name him, a ploy that resulted in him acquiring the handle 'Baby Boy.' The problem with Baby was that he had unexpected charm and daring, and we couldn't give him away. The kitten who hid became the cat who wanted to know about everything in the house, including people. He had classic cat attributes, in particular curiosity and mischief-making. Even as a small kitten, he would take Smudge, or even-heftier Frankie, on in a friendly game of fisticuffs. And he frequently bested them.

B
aby and Smudge both like to be made up in the clean sheets when we change our bed. On one occasion, Smudge ended up under the bottom sheet and Baby ended up on top of it. And then the two of them chased each other back and forth, like two sides of a coin wrestling each other, until Michael and I dissolved in laughter. They didn't get the joke.

Baby also walked across the curtain rods in my studio, knocked knick-knacks off the top of my kitchen cupboards, and leapt from my dresser, across a huge gap, to the top of a seven-foot tower. Waking up to a loud thud and seeing the tower, with its shelves of keepsakes, swaying back and forth under Baby's feet terrified me, but not him: he continues to do it, usually in the middle of the night.

I have a Cat Game app on my iPad, which Baby enjoys playing. In it, a dot of light dodges and bounces along over any one of several floors, including wood, rocks, and grass among others. It responds to the pouncing paws that dance across the iPad glass so that the cat controls the game quite directly. If Kitty is getting too much dot-action, it slides to an edge and disappears. Baby soon learned to wait for the dot to 'escape' and then ambush it underneath the iPad. Such a good idea, although he hasn't captured the darned thing yet.

Frankie and Baby are my two playful fellows. When I contemplated the DOORSTOP in the middle of my bed today, I knew that either Frankie or Baby had nabbed it. I praised them both for their bravery and put the doorstop securely back in its accustomed spot, then went out with Michael to dinner. It had migrated to the living room by the time we got back home.

Flexing my Crone Muscle

2011-03-15T14:39:00.004-05:00

I got to flex my Crone muscle yesterday and I discovered that it is very well-developed. Coming out of Hobby Lobby, I passed a young woman with a double stroller and a small boy perhaps 4 or 5 years old. The boy was crying and, from the mom's comments, it was clear she had just spanked him. Now, I've been known to spank a kid or two myself, so I didn't get alarmed about that, but what happened next really made me angry.

Mom got to the entrance of Hobby Lobby, put the boy up against the wall outside, and went in with the other two kids. I watched for a bit, thinking she would never leave him there, but she did. She strolled far enough away that I could no longer see her and, of course, the little boy couldn't either. That just made my blood boil. Besides being criminally stupid from a safety point, it was also a calculated terror tactic inflicted on a child too young to know that his mother wasn't really going to leave him behind. (And, you know, sometimes they do leave the kid behind.)

I walked back to the store from my car. I had given her quite a bit of time to return by the time I got to the store's vestibule. I walked by the boy, still crying, and said, "I'm going to talk to your mommy." Inside, I told her, in a calm, firm voice, "If you leave him there, I am going to call the police." You know, it didn't faze her as much as I expected. She told me she wasn't leaving him, she put him in time out. I pointed out that he was terrified and that she darn well knew it. She rejoined that she could see him, so everything was fine. I pointed out that he couldn't see her, so that was not fine. "Kids can't see there parents in time out at home," was her justification. "This is not your home and this is not a safe place," was my final comment.

Mom decided to retrieve the child and I decided to go to my car. I didn't get in it, though, until I saw mom walk away with all three children in tow. When I first approached her, the mother was at the far end of the Hobby Lobby vestibule from where she had left her child. If someone had driven by in a car and seen an opportunity, the little boy could have been snatched and gone before mom could have done anything more than yell about it. And, when I went in, she was bending over the stroller taking care of the toddler and baby she had in there. She wouldn't have even seen her son disappear.

Some people might consider this to be interferring or intruding; I consider it to be flexing my Crone muscles, that well-developed sense of wisdom that one achieves by living a long time and paying attention. Note to all young mothers, it is never okay to leave your pre-schooler outside a store while you go inside. Whatever lesson you think you are teaching is not worth the risk to the child and is not worth the terror of abandonment you inflict on the child. All the young mothers of my acquaintance probably already know this, but apparently no one pointed it out to this young woman prior to our encounter.

Since I turned 60, I seem to lookback on my own life more than I used to and I see many instances where I wish I had been smart enough to make different choices than the ones I made. About childrearing, I wish I had laughed more and gotten annoyed less. Is the wisdom of old age merely self-criticism? Do we understand how to do things better because we see the consequences in our own lives? Perhaps so. I have to say, though, that even as the rawest recruit to motherhood, I would never have left my child outside a store while I walked inside. I'm glad I was there yesterday and I hope that mom understood the "not safe" part enough to never do it again.

Time Flies

2011-01-24T21:24:00.002-06:00

Time flies when you're having fun. It also flies when you are too busy, not paying attention, or having too many senior moments. I can scarcely believe I haven't written a post since last April. Ironically, I think about writing posts almost daily. Whenever things happen that I want to comment on, I begin composing a post in my head. I often think about them while I'm driving and when I'm trying to fall asleep. Why don't they get from my head to my blog? That is a question I can't answer.

To a certain extent, I have been in writing avoidance for a while. That began a couple of years ago when I realized I couldn't continue working on my memoir until some big issues related to it got resolved. Since the memoir is about raising Victoria, I needed to finish getting her raised, or at least getting her to a recognizable transition point, before I could understand the ending of the memoir. Since Victoria came home from her two-year sojourn away from us - first at boarding school and then in the Job Corps - she has gotten her own apartment and started attending community college. That feels like a natural place to stop a book about raising a child.

How I wish I was actually done raising her. Even with her own apartment and car, she is so much less competent than most young adults that it frightens me. But that is a different book than the one I started several years ago about the circumstances that led Michael and me to adopt a three-year-old when our other kids were nearly grown and the unanticipated problems of raising a child with mental illness that followed.

Bringing this back to my blog, I have been writing adverse for some time and I feel as if that block is lifting. I can look at my writing studio and think about clearing my desk off without my eyes glazing over and a bout of situational amnesia occurring. I have actually signed up for a writing workshop in February that includes a session on poetry and a session on memoir. And here I am, writing a new post for my blog.

Nothing fancy, just getting my hands back into it. I don't have any particularly deep thoughts to share right now. Earlier tonight, I attended a yoga class. It is my third week back in yoga after almost a year's hiatus. Could yoga and writing have something to do with each other? Yoga is good exercise for my body, but it causes me some angst. I had an incredibly flexible body in my younger years, the kind that allows one to tuck one's leg behind one's neck on the rare occasions one wants to do that. Does it surprise you to hear that I have significantly less flexibility now than I used to have? Probably not. So why does it surprise me?

I have an edge over most people in my age-group when it comes to the losses of aging. When I first became ill with lupus, 22 years ago, and for many years after that, I had very limited mobility. I thought of it as premature aging when it happened. In my early 40s, I needed assistance to walk, first a cane, then a walker, then an electric scooter. Although I am thankfully not that handicapped at the moment - I am knocking loudly on wood as I write this - I am usually more content to live with the gentler losses of mobility and flexibility that normal aging brings than are some of my friends. I have lived with a lot worse than being creaky and far-sighted!

Before my wandering thoughts become completely lost, I must stop writing. I feel pleased to have done this work tonight and hopeful that I will be able to keep it up at a considerably more regular rate in future.

Ciao!

"It's the Law"

2010-04-29T23:15:00.003-05:00

Here's my riff on a Mad-lib dedicated to Arizona's wrong-headed legislature's and governor's new anti-illegal immigrant law. Most of you won't ever be subjected to this, for a variety of reasons ranging from where you live to what your ethnicity is, so I wanted to share the upcoming Arizona experience with you. Of course, those of you who are Anglo, speak with a typical American accent, or aren't too ethnic looking probably won't even get to experience it in Arizona. More's the pity.

"It's the Law"

Set up: A police officer, sheriff, constable, or other law enforcer in Arizona has just stopped you.

"___________ (insert Lady, Sir, Kid, Wetback, N****r or any other appropriate name or title here). Do you know you were ______________ (insert speeding, double parking, spitting, jaywalking, or another minor violation of the law here). I'll need to see proof of your American citizenship.

"What, you don't have proof of citizenship on you? You are not carrying a ____________ (insert only certified copy of your birth certificate, passport, naturalization papers, or certificate of citizenship here) with you to the __________ (insert grocery store, gas station, Wal-Mart, church, gym, or whatever is appropriate here)?

"Well, then, you'll just have to come along with me to the police station. You can use your one phone call to get someone to bring it to you.

"What, you don't have a copy of the document at home either? I guess you got a problem.

"I don't give a ___________ (insert red rat's ass, shit, flip, f**k or other favorite expletive here) if you lost all your belongings in a ______________ (insert fire, hurricane, flood, robbery or whatever disaster is appropriate here). You need proof of citizenship. It's the law.

"Save your sob story for the judge. I'm just doing my job."

Did you know that Arizona's state motto is Didat Deus, or "God Enriches"? It seems God is going to get a little boost from fines the new law levies against illegal aliens - or ill-documented Americans. Don't forget to bring your passport, certified birth certificate, or naturalization papers with you when you travel to or through Arizona. (Hmmm, maybe this new law is really a ploy by the birthers to force Obama to bring his birth certificate with him when he goes to Arizona.)

Ciao

She’s Baa-aack ...

2010-04-15T20:58:00.002-05:00

I guess I've let my cats do the talking around here for long enough. Smudge is starting to get an attitude with me about who is the better writer - so unbecoming in a feline, don't you think? - and fraNkie and Trixie will be copying him soon enough if I don't put a stop to it. So I am asserting myself and reclaiming my blog.

"The Winter of Our Discontent," John Steinbeck's last novel, sums up the last six months of my life in its title. I have not felt comfortable in my skin since my father died last October. Perhaps it is simply grief, or a confrontation with my mortality, or an existential crisis of intergalactic proportion, but I feel disconnected from myself in a profound way.

The age of 35 has always seemed to me to be the perfect age. At 35, I was no longer a wunderkind who might not have what it takes to stay in the game. I had proven myself in my career (telecommunications) and established a solid reputation. I had a home and family, the beginnings of the American dream, and I thought the world was my oyster. I am certain that this is ringing a bell with a number of you.

And that 35-year-old me has just hung in there ever since. When I thought about myself, I felt like I was 35. At 35, I was fairly hot (just ask Michael) - tall and slender and full of enthusiasm and joie de vivre. It was a wonderful self to remain for all these years and I managed to hang onto myself as 35 even through my terrible lupus years of limited mobility and huge weight gain.

Age never bothered me. Hiding my age never occurred to me. And getting older didn't matter because I was only 35 no matter what my birth certificate said. This summer, I will turn 60 and I find I cannot get my head around that. At times over the past few months I have just sat back and contemplated 60, but I never get very far. It is like contemplating the origin of the universe - the more I think about it the more complicated it gets.

60-year-olds used to seem much older than I am now. I know a number of people who are turning 60 this year, too, and some of them look much older than I do. Or, at least, I tell myself that. Then I catch a glance of myself in a mirror in an unguarded moment, or see a recent photo of myself and POW! - I'm looking a little more worn around the edges than I think.

My dad died at 88, just a month short of his 89th birthday. For several years now, he had been failing and I had gotten used to seeing an elderly man when I visited. This last year, the change in him was drastic, perhaps because he no longer had the strength (or inclination?) to exert himself intellectually. Most of the time, he was a bystander with the world spinning around him. Most of the time, he seemed older to me than was possible.

And that's how I feel about myself right now. I am older than I thought possible. I am 59 years and 9 months old. Friends not much older than me are dying. People my age die regularly. It is morbid, no doubt, to be so caught up in this age-anxiety. And it is so unlike me. It bothers me that getting older would bother me.

I don't dye my hair and I don't plan to start. I don't wear clothes that are "too young" for me or for my figure. I have no interest in Botox or a face-lift - although I do appreciate good foundation garments. I am not seeking my long lost youth.

The plain facts are that I am seeing the end of my life on the horizon. I can't keep putting off all those "I'll get to it" items any longer. If I don't sort out the photographs soon, they may never get sorted out at all!

All winter, while I haven't been blogging, I have been quilting in one form or another. Quilting offers permanence. Nothing I did in this world heretofore was so great that it would outlive me except my children. My quilts may not be great, but most of them will outlive me. At the quilt guild meeting this month, someone showed off her great-grandmother's quilts, made almost a hundred years ago.

I find comfort in thinking that in 2110 my great-grandchild - or great-great grandchild - might be cozied up under a quilt I made and happen to read the label: "Hand quilted by Lane Gustafson Devereux for (whoever) in 2010" and ask her mother who I was. With any luck, there will still be stories of my more outrageous and wonderful adventures around.

I guess I'd better try to lighten up a little for myself and for my audience. If I stay this morbid, you're going to want the cats back!

Ciao

Who's da' cat?? I'm da' cat!!

2010-03-23T23:11:00.001-05:00

Oh, yeah. I'm da' cat all right. Where did I say fraNkie probably was? In the messy garage or Tori's messy bedroom. Well, guess what? M found fraNkie in the garage tonight. How about that?

Do you remember me mentioning a while back that fraNkie was not the brightest kit in the litter?? Mom gave me a hard time for picking on him when I said it, but honestly, I was just telling the truth. Okay, now I have proof. That cat has been in the garage since Saturday night with no food or water. Mom and M looked for him out there more than once. They called him from the door more than once. They left the door ajar more than once while they did people errands in and out. And did fraNkie come out? No. Not even to eat!! I'm sorry, but that is a d**b cat.

Not only that, he won't come in tonight! He's hiding from Mom of all the d**b ideas. She brought him food and water and left it for him and he did eat a little. I went out to talk to him and "bring him in" as they say in the spy movies. (Oh, yeah, I love spy movies ... I watch them with M quite often.) Well, he wouldn't come in even for his brother. And after I told everyone that I missed him ... Sheesh, talk about embarrassing a fellow in front of his friends.

Well, Mom is coming to shut down the computer so I have to run. I heard her tell M that they should leave the garage door open all night, even after they turn off the lights, so M went out and locked the big door in the front. We'll see if I can coax him into the house after my people are in bed. Wish me luck.

And thanks for your kind thoughts. They probably are what made fraNkie show his tail to M tonight. (Literally: He thought he was hiding, but his big ole' butt was hanging out. LOL I told you fraNkie was d**b, but he's my brother and I love him.)

Very Bad News about fraNkie

2010-03-23T13:13:00.001-05:00

My brother is missing. He slipped out of the house last Saturday when M was going in and out to do yard work. Mom looked for fraNkie when dinner time came and he didn't show up, but could not find him anywhere in the house or the garage. Personally, I think he could actually be in the garage or in their big girl's room because those are such a mess a cat could get lost. But I would never say that to Mom and M because it is a sore subject for them.

I know Mom thought fraNkie would be home on Sunday, beside himself because he missed dinner, but it did not happen. And it has not happened since then either. Mom keeps checking the backyard and she's been putting out extra food for the wild cats, too, in case he is sneaking in to eat when she's not around. Mom is very sad.

She told me that, while I'm her best cat ever, she really loved how soft and cuddly fraNkie could be when he decided to let her pet him. She misses him coming on their bed at night for pets and she misses his wonderful purring. Now, if I were not so certain of my place in Mom's heart, this might worry me, but I am not that kind of cat. I spend my special time with Mom every single day and even when I am not resting on her chest, she tells me how much she loves me.

I have gotten the feeling lately that I might have to cut back on my kibbles and treats. Mom rearranges me when I snuggle down on her and says, "Smudge, I can't breathe!" There's no way I intend to give up my snuggles, so I guess I have to face my weight issues head on. I am not giving up snuggling with Mom. The snuggling I like more than anything else is crawling into the sleeve of her big sweatshirt when she's wearing it. Then she wraps it around me and it feels just like heaven, so safe and cozy.

Well, enough about me. Worrying about fraNkie is getting Mom down and I wish I could figure out what to do. One night when M went out to feed the wild cats, I slipped out myself. I figured I could find fraNkie faster than anyone else since I know the cat territory. But I chickened out. That big dark yard reminded me of when I was scared and cold and sick, before Mom whispered me inside, and I couldn't take it. I ran back in the house as quick as I could.

Sorry fraNkie, I didn't mean to let you down. I wish you would come home because Mom and M miss you and I do, too. (The mean cat doesn't care about that, though; she's hoping I'll go away now too so she can have Mom and M all to herself.) I did hear M say that if fraNkie didn't come back, they would get me another pet. That would be nice, but my brother would be nicer.

If everyone thinks good thoughts about fraNkie coming home, maybe he will show up soon.

Smudge at Your Service

2010-03-10T23:00:00.002-06:00

Smudge at Your Service

Mom finally stepped away from the computer without turning it off, so I can finally use it. She has been on this energy saving kick ever since the home show and she keeps turning things off and pulling plugs. I don't really mind the pulling plugs though because sometimes fraNkie and I like to nibble on the cords and when they are plugged in you can get an unpleasant jolt. Mom doesn't feel too well right now. I can tell because she isn't as playful as usual and she is really moving slowly, too.

I thought maybe her cuts were still hurting - she made a terrible noise when I ran across her stomach a few days after she got those cuts - but I heard her tell her friend they all healed fine. But now it is something else. What is it with people anyway? Cats are much more resilient and complain a whole lot less, too!

Back to Mom. She went to another doctor and when she came home, I thought she needed some catnip!! She told M that the doctor said she had chronic kidney disease stage III (moderate) and that she had to have more tests and - worst of all - she had to stop taking the pills that make her joints and muscles not hurt. Ever since, she has been making bad noises, and walking slow, and she needs to take pain medicine all day instead of just at night.

The doctor told her that if she doesn't take the joint medicine - something called NSAID - maybe her kidneys will get better. M asked her what that stage III part meant and she said it meant her kidneys, working together, only worked 30% of what they should. That kind of worries me because I think Jack went away because his kidneys didn't work right. I couldn't stand it if Mom went away. I may be the alpha cat around here nowadays, but I still need my cuddles on a regular basis. M tries, but he just can't cuddle like Mom can.

I especially like it when Mom is wearing a big sweater because I crawl into the sleeve as far as I can go and Mom puts the sweater over me, and then I just go into cat heaven. It is better than catnip! She seems to like it just as much I me. Well, there's a line here of cats with something to say, so I guess my turn is over.

its fraNkies turn now

Smudge is so bossy. I had to wait a long time for my turn. I like this new typing thing mom has cuz sometimes it fixes stuff and I don't even have to know how to do it. So if I seem smarter, im really not.

Ihave been having a lot of trouble with the mean cat. She gets really mad at me whn I snuggle with mom on the bed. She bats me with her claws out!! Mom cant seme to do anything with her and I am getting tired of it.

But I never bat her back. I jst lay on the bed real quiet and try to ve invisible. If the mean cat would jist let me, I would be her friend. I like to cuddle and I would cudd;e with her on the bed. Sometimes she lets me get a little close to her but not much.

Mom always wants to cuddle with me but I am not ready for interspecies cuddling. She can feed me treats from her hand and that's okay. She can brush me too as long as she keeps it in the bedroom wher it belongs. Boundaries, mom, boundaries. When I tiptoe out into the big part of the house it is pretty scary and I don't want anyone picking me up. That is the scariest. And I know mom wants to pick me up, I can see it in her eyes.

Of course as soft and round as I am that makes sense. She can hardly keep her hands off me. Training mom has been harder than I thought it would be. Oh here comes the mean cat. I have to hide.

You Can Call Me Ms. Trixie

Well, I chased off those two ruffians. They know that my human's desk chair belongs to me, so I can't think why they would even get near it. I am getting quite sick and tired of those boys. They take attention that should be mine. I have had to resort to sitting on my human's lap, something I thought I would never stoop to. Fawning and playing up to people has always been beneath me, but hard times force hard choices.

The big dumb kit, fraNkie, is almost all right. Sometimes I am tempted to try getting close to him like I did with Jack, but then I stop myself. NO ONE can replace Jack and I feel so sad remembering that he left and never came home again. And so what if I take it out on the juvenile delinquents? The dirty cat (his name is Smudge) really gets me going. He stalks me and chases me every day. When I call him on it, he claims that it's all in fun and he just wants to play. Right.

My position requires that I rise above it as much as possible without condoning bad behavior. That goes for cats and humans. Just to remind my human that she should treat me with respect, I think I'll leave a fresh hairball on her chair before I go in for evening treats. It will be quite amusing to watch her reaction when she finds it tomorrow morning.

Hooligans

2010-01-20T20:17:00.003-06:00

I am surrounded by hooligans. They say I am old and mean. Harrumph, they haven't seen mean yet.

This used to be a very nice home. Jack could be troublesome, but after 15 years together, we had worked out most of the kinks in our relationship. Usually, I could count on him to groom my head and face at least once a day. His antics entertained our people enough that they left me in peace. I had long ago trained then to keep their distance and only touch me when I gave them permission. You don't hear about people going around picking up Queen Elizabeth and living to tell about it, do you? Same principle applies with me.

Then something happened to Jack. He started to shrink, literally. He lost interest in his normal activities. He let that little whippersnapper, Dirty Nose, bully him sometimes. That was not the Gentleman Jack I knew. The people kept taking him away and bringing him back smelling like the poke-at-you place. Then he stayed there long enough that his smell scared me. Then he went away and didn't come back.

I suppose our people think we don't understand because we are cats. Harrumph. I know perfectly well that Jack got so sick and tired of those hooligans that he left the country and didn't look back. I'd do the same thing if I felt more comfortable going outdoors without my entourage.

So now, instead of a suitably adoring, if occasionally curmudgeonly, companion, I have to contend with two hooligans. Smudge - he of the spot as permanent as Lady MacB's - and Frankie - the blind boy - are nothing but trouble. I do feel a little sorry for Frankie because he does not, in fact, see well and it makes him very skittish. (FYI - Skittish comes from the feline word "to skit" meaning "to act like a kitten.") But D.N. has nothing to recommend him. He crawls right up on my person and LAYS ON HER, sometimes even when I am draped regally at her feet on the reclining throne.

I give them a hiss and the back of my paw whenever I can just to keep them on their toes. I am the queen of this kingdom and if they don't show me the respect I deserve, they will be sorry. Let's not forget that the front of my paws have well-sharpened claws and I know how to use them. I've even taken a swing at my M. P. recently when she got between me and the hooligans. She will learn not to overstep.

The Queen of Hearts had it right: Off with their heads!

Queen Beatrix Autumn
(Trixie to her close companions)

P.S. My main person got out her traveling bag tonight and started putting clothes in it. I have been around long enough to know what that means. She will not be around for a while. It could be one treat cycle or it could be several treat cycles. Either way, I will be suitably crabby when she comes back no matter how many treat cycles it is. I hate going without my bedtime treats. The back-up person would give me my regular bedtime treats, but I prefer to keep him in his place by letting him pet me, but refusing to take treats from him. You can't let the people get too familiar, you know.

Who Doesn't Love a Snuggle?

2010-01-11T22:21:00.003-06:00

Mom has been moving too fast for me today. She never even sat in her big chair this evening. I like to climb up on her chest, right under her neck, and snuggle in the evening when she's sitting there. But not today. Why don't people learn to relax, like cats do? Napping is a very productive occupation. It is good for your digestion and it makes you a more pleasant creature. Even mean ol' Trixie doesn't growl at us so much when she sleeps on top of Mom and M's bed with Frankie and me.

I noticed that Trixie growls at us more ...

I'm Back! It took me a whole week to get my chance. I got rudely bumped off the computer by Mom (sorry to be harsh, Mom, but you were rude) and then she hardly got on her computer all week. Usually I can count on time during the weekend, but she went all weekend long without even turning on her computer. It drives me crazy, but we've already had the opposable thumb conversation, so I'll try to regain my train of thought.

I noticed that Trixie growls at us more when Mom and M are around, especially if they are talking to us, or petting us, or brushing us. Usually they brush "fraNkie" because he has long hair. My hair does not need brushing because it is just the right length, which is good, because I don't like brushing that much. I like snuggling, which is where I started with this post.

When Mom first whispered me inside, I felt scared and I was sick. Mom wanted to make me feel safe and keep me warm, so she carried me inside her big sweater thing. It has very, very big sleeves - like a shawl with cuffs, I heard Mom tell someone - and I would crawl into the sleeve part and curl up for long naps. When I came out, if I didn't feel like eating or playing, I would sit on Mom's chest, way up high so I could snuggle under her chin.

Now days, it is harder to get into the sleeves of her sweaters, even that big one, but I still squeeze in as much as I can. And I still snuggle on her chest. My head fits under her chin just right and she holds me and snuggles me when I'm there. She rubs me with her chin. (Not very many people know that chin rubs on a cat's cheek and face are very, very special to us because of how we are made, but Mom has always done it and I love her for it.)

I have heard her tell M that I am a lot heavier now than when I was a kitten. And sometimes I jump onto her from the other furniture or off her to the other furniture and then she gets a very wide-eyed look and says "Ooof." She doe not seem to like that. Once, I accidentally got my claws into one of those bumps she has on her chest as I launched myself and then she kind of yowled and said bad words. But most of the time, she is calm and behaves in a very cat-like way.

Decorum is very important to cats, you know. Well, most of the time. We do allow for playtime. "All sleep and no play makes Puss a dull cat," as the old saying goes. "What about the catnip?" you ask. Okay, I'll admit it. When there's catnip around, we can't be responsible for our conduct; however, that is not a fit topic for a public forum and I'm not saying another thing about it.

Mom was taking a shower, but now she is moving around in her den, so I better wrap it up.

Miao

my name is fraNkie

2010-01-07T17:59:00.005-06:00

my name is frankie my brother has been saying mean things abou5t me on the com0puter i think he shouldbt do that becasdiue i am just a littkle cat i amn not even 1 year old yet i cant dfo as many thingfs as smudge can but he is not as soft and berautiful as i am trixie is the meanest cat alive she scatres me a lto lots of things scare mne becdause i am not used toi inside noises ort people

i lived outside all my life until mom tricked me into coming inside at first i didnt mind because myu sisters were wityh me then they webnt away most of the time smudgte is a good brother he plauys with me every day and we sleep nest to each other too smudge is not afread of trixie sometomes he even chases her until she takes a swipe at him then even smudge will back away i usually just flp on my back when she gets close to me she wont hirt me whemn i show her my tummy

mom likews to brish me and pet me i like it too but sometimes she moves too fast and i get scared and run away smudge saod i was too dumb to eat my food without mom showing it to me but that is not true i jist dont like to get too vlose until i knoe that it is safe for me

so plrease dont believe thngs sthat smudge says agbout me i am a nice cat and he knows it if you see my cat mom tell her i said hi and i havent forgotten about her i wish she was not outside in this cold weather but mom and m are puttig out extra foods for the outsoide cats this weel to help them stay warm

it is nice to meet you
bye
fraNkie

I Need an Opposable Thumb!

2010-01-05T22:18:00.004-06:00

Cats are nearly perfect creatures in every regard; however, it is a shame that we don't have opposable thumbs. Mom has been distracted and busy, gone for a long time some days, and this is the first chance I've had to get at the computer to update her blog. She doesn't realize how frustrating it is for me when she hibernates her computer during the day or turns it off altogether at night.

I have heard her saying something to him about saving energy. I can't imagine how they could save anymore energy than they already do. Don't tell Mom I said this, but they sit around an awfully lot. Frankie and I play chase with each other, we jump up on high windows and bookcases and, of course, our cat condo. We harass Trixie a little bit if we are feeling very, very rambunctious. (Have I mentioned that she's mean? If we get too wild, or sometimes if we even try to politely walk past her to use the facilities, she growls and she doesn't stop until we are out of sight.)

We also play with Mom and sometimes him, which is about the only exercise I ever see them getting. They have been a challenge to train, him especially, but since Frankie and I both still have all nine of our lives, we can invest the necessary time. Mom has learned to curl up in bed so that Frankie can sleep by her feet and I can sleep by her neck. She hardly ever kicks or rolls on us anymore and, if she does, she stops as soon as she wakes up enough to know what she's doing. When she gets out of bed at night to use their facilities - a lot nicer than ours, btw - she scoots out from under the covers without pushing us off the bed.

That is very thoughtful of her, but I usually get up anyway to escort her. I'd hate to think she ran into any trouble and I was not there to help. Frankie might come along if he's already awake, but if he is sleeping at the bottom of the bed, he just keeps his lazy hindquarters stuck to the bed and pretends he is asleep.

I'm sure you can figure out that someone is not doing quite as well with his training. He kicks a lot and pushes his feet against the railing at the end of the bed, so it is pretty miserable trying to sleep with him. Sometimes he scrunches into the middle of the bed and I can find a little room along the edge of the mattress. Not too often, though, because Mom says, "If you're going to sleep in the middle of the bed, then why did we have to buy a queen-sized?" I am not sure what a queen-sized is, but I guess Mom was not to impressed with it.

You might be wondering why I keep writing him and he, etc. instead of Dad. Well, believe it or not, he objected to a cat calling him Dad!! That just chaps my fluffy butt. How did he get such a big head? Well, I have thought and thought about it, and I decided to call him M. If he doesn't like that, too bad; I'm not going to change one more time for anybody. Even if Mom asks me to really nicely. She spoils M anyway.

Whew, Mom was coming to turn off the computer but she got sidetracked by Frankie. He can be good for something every once in a while. She just started brushing him and that can keep her entertained for quite a while.

Mom's big girl, Alix, came over yesterday and she got a good look at Frankie for the first time in a while. (Frankie's a hider.) She got very excited and said she thought he was some kind of fancy cat. Alix and Mom got on the computer for a long time, looking at cat pictures and reading stuff, and they said Frankie looks just like a Birman cat and acts like one, too. I jumped up on Mom's lap and took a look myself. I must admit there is a strong resemblance.

Birman cats have the darker colors on their legs and face and creamy colors on their body like Frankie. And they have very distinctive mittens and stockings on their feet that do look like Frankie's. They have tiny voices, which is true of my brother, and long silken hair with no undercoat so it doesn't tangle. Frankie's coat is like that, too. (That's why Mom is always brushing him and petting him and making goo-goo sounds about his fur. Yuck.)

I guess I can see why they think he's one of those Birman cats, but I have to tell you, it is sheer dumb luck that he turned out as well as he did. We do not come from fancy cats. We are salt-of-the-earth, backyard cats, and I haven't seen any hoity-toity Birman cats hanging around my birth mother.

Mother is quite stunning and unique in her own way. She is a gray tabby with very, very long hair. There's a big ruff around her neck like a lion's mane. Her coat gets even bigger in cold weather and right now she looks very scary when I see her in the backyard eating. Alix thinks she is a Maine Coon cat, but again, that seems a little far fetched. She might look like the pictures on the computer, but how would a Maine Coon cat end up as a feral living on her wits and the kindness of strangers in this neighborhood?

I am a tuxedo cat, the smartest and handsomest kind of cat anyone could want, and it is hard to fathom why they even care about Frankie's genealogy, but, if it makes them happy, they can believe any fantastic thing that they want.

If Mom would cut me some slack and leave her computer on a bit more, I could visit with y'all more. Why don't you mention it to her if you get the chance? But nicely. She's my Mom and I don't want her feelings to be hurt.

Miao

Meow Culpa

2009-12-26T17:38:00.003-06:00

The Old Man got very upset the other day because he found out I had called him the Old Man in the blog. He said to Mom, "What's this "Old Man" #&%*@? Did you get a boyfriend or something?" Well, you could have knocked me over with a mousie! In the cat world, all the dads are called Old Man because we usually don't know for sure which one is our actual dad. Sometimes there are a couple of dads for the same litter; it can get confusing. To cats, Old Man is a title of respect and a certain amount of fear. They are fearsome creatures, scarred up from fighting and everything. It's best to keep your distance.

But I guess to people, it means something else. I'm not sure what, but I know he did not like it. So, in the ancient words of cat spirituality, I say to Dad, "Meow culpa, meow culpa, meow maxima culpa. I will not call you anything but Dad from now on. Oh, and I am pretty sure Mom doesn't have any boyfriends. I have never smelled an outsider male person on her and I get to smell her a lot when I snuggle."

Now that I've taken care of that, I will say a few words about Christmas Day at our house. Tori woke up Mom and Dad at 3:00 a.m. and wanted to go open presents. Mom and Dad BOTH said the %$*&@$* words and told her to go back to bed. She did - after she went in the kitchen and ate snacks. We cats have never gotten a snack at 3:00 a.m. and I would like to figure out how to open the big box so we could do that, too.

Well, I suppose you can guess that Mom could not go back to sleep and Dad didn't get good sleep either. He said he tossed and turned. Just what he was tossing and turning is unclear to me, but I know it was not treats or cat toys. At least he stayed in bed. Mom went in her working room and turned on her machine. I don't really like that machine because Mom won't let me jump up and walk around it or sleep in front of it, like she let's me at her computer.

I tried to jump up and she said, "No, Smudge," and it scared me and I slipped. That made me grab with my claws and part of what I grabbed was Mom's leg, which made her yell again. I got out of there before she could yell anymore, but later she did say sorry to me and that she knew it was an accident.

By 7:00 a.m. both Mom and Dad were up, but not Tori. Dad made himself a breakfast taco and Mom made caramel rolls. The breakfast taco smelled really, really good; the caramel rolls not so much, but Mom and Dad really like them. Dad says they are better because Mom makes them from scratch.

This is a confusing idea for me. I asked Trixie if she knew what"from scratch" meant, but she just hissed and walked away from me. And there's no point in asking Frankie, as we all know. So I am still confused. What I scratch is not anything even a cat would want to eat, although I've heard that some dogs are known to sink that low.

Back to Christmas. When Mom and Dad finished eating, they made Tori get up even though she didn't want to anymore. And then they found a lot of things piled in the living room and more things wrapped in paper under the tree. I am not impressed with this Christmas business in the least. First of all, I was prowling the house, doing my guard duty, when the guy they call Santa came by with gifts. He was in and out so fast he didn't even leave presents for Frankie, the mean cat, or me.

Can you believe that? Maybe the mean cat didn't deserve one, but Frankie and I have been very, very good all year except for one or two small lapses caused by over excitement. (That's my story and I am sticking to it.) So we should have gotten something from Santa.

The second reason I'm not impressed with Christmas is that if it wasn't for our cousins Kasey and Coffee, we would not even have ANY presents. They gave us lovely cat treats, just the kind we like best, but no one else got us anything. So I say, "Bah Junebug," to Christmas.

Tori didn't like Christmas very much either. She was disappointed, I could tell. Dad said, "This is your first grown-up Christmas and you still want a kid's Christmas." But she got gift cards and a lot of money from her Grandma, so today she bought things that made her happy. So now she is excited about Christmas and it is already over. Go figure!

Alix and Adam came over, too, but not until afternoon. I could hear a lot of laughing, so I know everyone had fun, but I had to stay in the bedroom with Frankie because he just gets terrified when outside people come in our house. Trixie does, too, and then she is not so mean to us and let's us get on Mom and Dad's bed with her. I think Trixie would be happier (and nicer) if she would relax a little. She seems very anxious all the time and I know the 'rents are worried about her because she keeps getting smaller and smaller.

If she would not hiss at us, Frankie and I could snuggle up with her and keep her warm, and groom her so her coat didn't look unkempt, and entertain her with our tricks and games. But it doesn't seem as if she will ever relax about Frankie and me. Too bad for her.

After Christmas there was a pretty big mess of stuff on the floor in the living room. Sometimes our people would rummage around in the mess and pull something out. Then they played quietly for a while. It is nice to see people relax and play. They should do it more often. That, and nap more. Who was it that asked, "Why can't people be more like cats?" (I think it was in a song.)

Let's hope New Year's Eve is more entertaining than Christmas.

Miao

"He's Not Heavy, He's My Brother"

2009-12-23T10:52:00.003-06:00

Mom is back in her room for making things. She told the Old Man that when she finished this present, she would be done for Christmas. I hope so, because she has not had much time for me lately. Last night I got my first good snuggle in a long time without Frankie S. butting in.

Frankie is my younger brother. We don't have the same father, but that really doesn't matter to cats. (And it shouldn't matter to people, either, IMHO.) Mom whispered Frankie, Lovie (his twin sister), and Little Bit into our house last June. She didn't want them to grow up wild like our birth mother. We had five cats in this house and that is a lot more cats than anyone should have. In fact, the perfect number of cats to adopt is ONE and it should be ME!!!! (Are you listening, Mom?)

Mom and the Old Man built this cage thing to keep the kittens from running all over the place. At night, they put them in the hallway bathroom so the could run around and play. I got kind of put out, because Mom spent an awful lot of time playing with them instead of me. Finally, she got rid of my two sisters. A nice lady came over with her four people-kittens and they picked Lovie and Little Bit and took them home.

That left Frankie. I know they planned to give Frankie away, but it never seemed to work out. When they found a place that would take him, he ran away! In fact, that kitten ran away two times before he settled down, and he brought us all fleas the second time!! The fleas made me get a b-a-t-h. I hate fleas.

One day, Mom told the O.M. that I liked to play with Frankie and they should let me have him for MY pet. And then they laughed, like it was real funny. They should know that no one can own a cat. Cats own themselves and sometimes people, but we are clever enough to let the people imagine they are the "owners." Mom was right about me liking to play with Frankie. After living with two old, crotchety cats who wouldn't know a real mouse from a toy, I wanted more action and Frankie provided lots of action.

The problem with Frankie is that he is not as ... gifted... as I am. I say this in all humility; I am a tuxedo cat and Frankie is not. Mom oohs and aahs over his fur because "It is the softest fur I have ever touched anywhere," but Frankie is still scared of people a lot and she doesn't get to pet him or brush him as often as she wants.

Here's the bad part. Whenever Mom plays with me, or brushes me, or snuggles me, or even when I sleep on Mom's chest with my head tucked under her chin, Frankie sticks his big nose in. He is not afraid of them if they are being nice to me. I hardly ever get any attention just for me anymore. Plus, he wants to sleep on my cat condo. The old cats never wanted to do that. I admit it has plenty of sleeping places and even a hiding place, and jumping off places, but it is mine and always has been.

It must seem like I don't like Frankie, but I really do. Besides, he needs me because he is ... how shall I put it? ... dumb! We get wet food in the morning and at night, and while Trixie (the mean cat) and I are gobbling ours up, Frankie just stands there looking confused. So every time, Mom has to scoot him over to his food and say, "This is yours, Frankie." And he gets very excited about our evening treats when she opens the treat jar, but if she doesn't put the treats right under his nose he gets all frantic and crazy looking for the treats until she helps him.

I heard Mom talking to the O. M. and she said, "I think Frankie doesn't see well and that's his problem. His eyes are a little crossed, after all." Now I'm a cat, and I'm his big brother, and I'm telling you: Frankie is as dumb as a stump. But we'll let Mom think it's his eyes. After all, he's not getting any little cat glasses any time soon, now, is he?

So that's a little bit more about my brother Frankie. And, BTW, he IS heavy, he already outweighs me. But if he thinks he can be the boss cat around here, he is so wrong. I'm already letting Trixie know that I am boss now.

Miao

Smudge at Your Service

2009-12-20T12:05:00.002-06:00

My Mom is busy in the room where she makes things. (I love to go in there now because she has lots of interesting things on the floor called scraps and they are fun to bat around and pounce on.) Mom doesn't know I am doing this, so don't tell her.

She hasn't been using her computer very much to write things lately. I'm pretty sure this is bothering her because I heard her telling the Old Man that someone sent her an anonymous email accusing her of being remiss. Whatever remiss means, she felt bad about it. Also, she overheard two other friends at a Christmas party saying she hadn't posted since October. Even though she feels bad about letting people down, she told the Old Man, she just couldn't post because her heart wasn't in it. So it seems to me that Mom needs some help.

My name is Smudge. I am a very handsome tuxedo cat. I'm not bragging. Mom says that all the time, so I know it's true. I live here with my younger brother, Frankie S., and a mean old cat named Trixie. We used to have another old cat, Jack, who was the boss cat, but he went away a while ago and he never came back. He had gone away a few times and then come back smelling funny, but this time he just disappeared. Mom and the Old Man were pretty upset, so I think something bad happened to Jack.

Mom went away and was gone so long I didn't think she was coming back, but finally she did. I felt so relived. (The Old Man tries hard, but he has a lot to learn about snuggling cats. Cats always say you can't teach old people new tricks, so I guess I shouldn't be too hard on him. He tries.) Anyway, while she was gone for a long time, her father went away and he didn't come back either. That upset Mom and the Old Man more than I've ever seen.

After she came back so sad, Jack disappeared. And after that there was a lot of commotion about holidays and she didn't seem to have much time for us. And, I hate to tell you, we found out that when Frankie escaped that time, he brought back fleas and gave them to all of us! It's embarrassing, but it's the truth. Mom really, really hates fleas and she was yelling about it a lot. Which is kind of dumb (sorry Mom) because everyone knows fleas can't understand people talk or cat talk for that matter. Or if they can, they pretend they can't.

So many things happened this fall that Mom got what's called a flare with her disease. I haven't seen this often, but I've only been here a year. The mean cat has been here 15 years and she told us that sometimes Mom got so sick she had to stay in bed all the time. That doesn't sound too bad to me, but apparently it is bad for people. No one wants her to get real sick like that, especially the Old Man, so he makes her rest. That isn't too hard, because every time she sits in her big chair, she falls asleep anyway.

So I guess that's why she hasn't been writing. She had to go away for a long time, then people and cats started disappearing, then the holidays came (and they haven't disappeared yet), and then she started her sleeping problem. Which is where I come in.

On December 27, 2008, Mom saved my life. She whispered me in from the backyard when I was very, very cold, and I was sick, and my real mom had disappeared. (She did come back, though. I see her out the window everyday now when the Old Man feeds hers.) I felt plenty scared of inside, I'll tell you, but I felt sicker than scared, so I let her tuck me inside her sweater thing and carry me around for a few weeks until the medicine I got at the sick animal place started working. By then, we had adopted each other and she's been my Mom ever since.

So that's why I am helping her out with her writing. I never thought I could write this much, but I am a tuxedo cat and everyone knows how smart we are. Poor Frankie, my little brother, is not a tuxedo cat, and you can really tell, but that's another story.

Miao

Fourth and Final Vacation Report

2009-10-05T14:13:00.007-05:00

I am finally finishing my report of vacation doings. It has taken a long time. I wonder why that is ... oh, well, time flies when you're having fun!

Our 4th big adventure happened at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. We were lucky enough to have our return stay in OKC coincide with the museum's late night. After we checked into our hotel, we took short naps, then headed out to find the Art. Actually, we were quite close, although I was glad to have my GPS along. OKC has a lot of twisty and one-way streets that would have been difficult to navigate from a map.

The museum itself is nestled between downtown buildings. It looks more incorporated with the business community than our art museums in Houston. They are in a separate Museum District. The glass-fronted building immediately revealed an unexpected treasure: A three-story, 2,100-object glass sculpture by a famous glass artist named Dale Chihuly. This lovely piece of art is titled the Kirkpatrick Memorial Tower. (Click on the name to see a photo of it.)

We first learned about Chihuly at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, a wonderful public art gallery and artists-in-residence workplace, when they sponsored an glass art exhibit last year. Along with glass from many artists, there was a film about Chihuly, his vast glass art facility, and techniques of blowing/making art glass. It fascinated me, partly because son Nick made beautiful glass art in college.

That exhibit had primed me for anything Chihuly. It turned out that the OKC Museum of Art has the largest collection of Dale Chihuly's work in the country. (His wife came from there, so he has roots in Oklahoma.) Once I heard that, I got excited. My excitement doubled when the guard told me that photography - even flash photography - was permitted in the Chihuly galleries. I immediately left to get my camera out of the car.

If you clicked on Chihuly's name in the paragraph above, you saw photographs of his exhibit. (If you didn't, do it now!) I cannot begin to describe them to you in words because they are so lush, so exotic, so mindblowingly beautiful that I would be writing for the rest of the day.

I took 234 photographs of the glass pieces. And I got a little revenge on Michael. I cannot tell you how many times I have stood around waiting for him to finish taking pictures. This time it was him waiting around instead of me! LOL

My plan is to use 15 of those photographs for my Houston Photographic Society portfolio review next week. In a portfolio review, several professional photographers evaluate your work and give you feedback in a kind of round robin manner. With this information, the photographer being reviewed can learn what needs to be done to improve the images and/or market them.

Turning pictures of glass art into good photographs is actually very difficult and I have struggled with it despite having taken so many pictures. I want my portfolio to be top-notch, with no amateur mistakes. Wish me luck on that.

Take a trip to Oklahoma City sometime and see the glass art galleries for yourself. They are gorgeous and you will be glad you did.

And that, along with the previous three blogs I posted, is what I did on my summer vacation. It was truly a good time.

Ciao

Vacation Reveries Part 3

2009-09-25T13:39:00.004-05:00

As promised, here is part three of my travelogue about vacationing in Grand Forks, North Dakota last month.

In 1997, Grand Forks experienced one of the most devastating floods in U.S. history. The Red River, which incidentally flows north to Lake Winnipeg in Canada, overflowed its banks, forcing 60,000 people from their homes. Flood waters filled the entire city and, to make matters worse, downtown Grand Forks started burning after the flood hit. Because fire trucks could not get through the flooded streets the fire burned out of control, destroying 11 buildings in the process.

Grand Forks has a sister city, East Grand Forks, which is just across the Red River on the Minnesota side. It too was devastated by the flood, with every home in the town under water. Between Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, the scale of destruction was enormous.

The basement of my sister's home flooded, but not the upper floors. When my dad built the house, he put the electrical junction box/circuit breaker panel in the garage for his own convenience although builders usually put them in the basement. This decision helped my sister and b-i-l very much because they had electricity after the flood, which most people did not have.

During the evacuation, their family got separated. My sister, b-i-l, and niece went to Bismarck to stay with one of our brothers. Their son ended up in Fargo with his very pregnant girlfriend. Her parents ended up in Minnesota. The teen-aged couple delivered their baby in a strange city with not one family member or acquaintance present to help or support them. (Fortunately, that turned out well. The baby is now a good-looking 12-year-old with two very darling little sisters.)

That's the background for telling you about the Greenway. The two towns decided to prevent a similar disaster by protecting the land in the expanded flood plain from development. To this end, they built the Greenway, 2,200 acres of open space developed and maintained for recreation in the heart of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. The Greenway is comprised of several parks, a campground, 2 golf courses, disc golf courses, not to mention more than 20 miles of multi-purpose trails, and shorebank fishing sites.

The campground is very slick. A large area of homes in East Grand Forks disappeared due to the flood, either washing away during it or being torn down after. Those in the flood plain could not be rebuilt, but the streets remained, the driveways remained, the sewer, electric, and gas connections remained - a perfect set up for a campground!

Michael and I decided to check out the Greenway. It is only three blocks east of my old house, so we walked over one morning. My old neighborhood remains about the same as I remember it except that the trees are much bigger and the streets correspondingly shadier. Crossing over to the Greenway, we walked through a small heritage park with historic homes I had never seen before. Apparently they were moved to that spot sometime after I left home in 1968. The wall of the levee rises immediately behind the historic homes. We walked another block to an entrance, which happened to also be the entrance to Lincoln Park golf course.

My most vivid memories of Lincoln Park are tobogganing down its hills in winter. Piled with the accumulated snow of a North Dakota winter and perhaps exaggerated by my tender age, those remembered hills were much taller and steeper than the gentle low hillocks visible to me as we entered the Greenway. Michael had his camera - of course - and we decided to take a little walk on the trail. We turned south so that we would be closer to home when we exited. The thing is, we had no idea how far we would be walking to find an exit. The pathway stretched ahead of us, meandering in lazy curves with a steep hill on our right - the levee itself - and the gentle slope down through trees to the river some distance away on our left.

We walked a long way. Sometimes we saw the rooftops of homes adjacent to the levee. In other places, you would think we were in the country. Periodically we came upon park benches set under trees, an amenity we would be thankful for after we had been walking for a while. A bicyclist passed us on the trail but we saw no one else, perhaps because it was a weekday and people were at work. I started to flag; walking or standing for more than 15 or 20 minutes puts a big strain on my hip and knee joints because of my lupus. Since there didn't seem to be any point in backtracking when we must be coming to an exit, we rested on a bench until I felt ready to keep walking.

The opening in the levee wall appeared at 32nd Avenue. We had entered the Greenway at 23rd Avenue. Nine blocks doesn't seem like such a long walk, but we had started out at 28th Avenue and now had to walk back to it and we had also walked three blocks east of our home base. Altogether we walked twenty-four blocks. I felt relieved when we got back home and I could sit on the sofa and lounge!

Another adventure we took involved driving to the University of North Dakota to see an exhibit at the North Dakota Fine Arts Museum. I had been to UND many times in my childhood because my dad worked on campus. He was assistant director of the state public health laboratory officed there when I was a child and going into his office had been a treat for me. The fellow who was my dad's boss, Mel, always had a piece of chocolate candy for me, the kind wrapped in shiny tinfoil and sometimes a small gift from a trip or something. I don't know why I received these tokens of affection from Mel, but they came with no strings attached and I looked forward to them.

The lab smelled funny, chemical smells and some animal smells. They kept white mice at the lab and periodically we would get to bring a couple of white mice home as pets. The mice scared me. I had been the first person to come upon an unfortunate scene of mouse-cannibalism among our pet mice as a preschooler and I never trusted mice after that.

UND has grown tremendously since my last visit. The English Coulee, a creek that used to be at the far western edge of the campus, now runs through the middle of it. One of the new buildings housed the art museum we were looking for. After a few wrong turns and wrong buildings, we finally found it. We wanted to see a photographic exhibit I had read about on the Internet. The photographer, Chuck Kimmerle, has had a career primarily as a photojournalist and this was his first solo exhibition. The show was named "The Desolate Landscape."

I hate to describe the work because I cannot do it justice. Be sure to follow the link I included above so you can see his work for yourself. Kimmerle photographs with a large format camera. This means that he can get exquisite detail from a long way off. He has photographed North Dakota's endless expanses, winter and summer, in a way that renders them mystical and sacred. The photographs look beautiful on the Internet, but seeing them in person, printed 20-inches by 24-inches, is literally breathtaking. I felt bad that no catalogue of the show had been printed because I wanted to take all the images home with me.

The final "big" adventure of our time in Grand Forks was the visit to Jennifer Patterson's studio in Alvarado, Minnesota. Jennifer owns Quilted in Clay and makes beautiful jewelry in the form of miniature quilts and quilt blocks. I met her at the Houston Quilt Festival last year and purchased the loveliest set of earrings and a matching necklace from her. Recognizing Alvarado, I introduced myself as being from the area. She said I should call her if I came for a visit and that is just what I did.

My parents and sister & b-i-l joined Michael and I on the trip to Alvarado. Jennifer and her husband Bruce actually live outside of town on a lush farmstead. Driving up the last mile or so on a gravel road, we passed an old, weathered building, a grain mill perhaps, overlooking a creek right at our turn into their front yard. As it happens, they own the old building and hope to renovate it into a guest cottage. Another old building they own sits right near their parking area - an old one-room school house.

Their own house is a classic rural Victorian with a welcoming front porch, a friendly dog, and a large and imposing goose. Apparently the dog is totally harmless, but the goose is not! A large truck garden and several trees heavily laden with fruit surround their house. Bruce and Jennifer came outside to meet us and graciously invited us in. We walked through the kitchen where Bruce was putting up plum preserves. The kitchen table had rows and rows of stacked mason jars full of plum jam and the canning kettle boiled away on the stove.

While Bruce went back to his preserves, Jennifer took us into the dining room and showed us a tall stack of plastic bins full of her jewelry. She invited us to go through them and pick out whatever we wanted to buy and pointed out some bins with sale items in them. What a lot of fun we women had going through that jewelry, each piece lovelier than the next. Janet and I quickly found things we liked, but Mother doesn't have pierced ears and thought she wouldn't be able to get any. Fortunately, Jennifer makes clip on as well as pierced earrings, so in the end, all three of us purchased something we liked.

The exquisite detail on such tiny pieces just boggles my mind and I asked Jennifer how she made the jewelry. She was kind enough to show us her studio and demonstrate her technique. Jennifer uses the techniques of millefiori, an ancient and famous glass making tradition and applies them to clay. As you will see when you look at her website, the results in clay are really beautiful. She will be back at the Quilt Festival in Houston in mid-October, so if you are interested, you can see her pieces there.

That is it for adventures in Grand Forks. The rest of my time was spent with my parents and family. Mother gave me more tutoring in quilting techniques and helped me get my current quilt sandwiched together, helped me design the templates for the stitching, and then encouraged me to get started. Quilting a queen-sized bedspread is daunting, but mine is well underway thanks to Mother. Michael went out and photographed several times without me, but I haven't seen the results yet.

When we returned home, we stopped again at my brother and s-i-l's in Omaha for another nice evening of home hospitality. We drove back to Oklahoma City on a Thursday. We had a plan for OKC - to visit the the Fine Arts Museum which happens to stay open late on Thursday nights. That is the final chapter in my vacation saga. I didn't really intend to go on and on like this, but it turned out to be a great vacation and I don't want to leave out any of the good stuff!

So, as soon as I can, but before it turns into October, I will finish up with my tale of the Dale Chihuly glass exhibit at the Oklahoma City Museum of Fine Arts.

Vacation Reveries Part 2

2009-09-16T21:58:00.003-05:00

I left off my vacation reveries with our time in my hometown, Grand Forks, North Dakota..

After Thomas Wolfe published his novel "You Can't Go Home Again" in 1940, the notion that you can't return to your childhood home because it has changed and you have changed achieved the status of cliche in American culture. Somewhat mangled into "You can never go home again," this adage is well-known and frequently cited. The Google search I conducted a moment ago brought up 47,000 citations for the phrase. But I think you can go home again if you have the right attitude.

Perhaps this feeling stems from the fact that I actually did stay in my childhood house during my vacation. My sister Janet - the only sister I have among six siblings - and her husband Dave - who was in my high school class - purchased my parents' home when my father became chief of laboratory services for the state of North Dakota and moved to Bismarck, the capital. This is not to say that the house remains the same as I remember it.

In their thirty-odd years of occupancy, Janet and Dave have made many wonderful improvements and updates to the house. Nature aided them somewhat in this endeavor by inundating the whole town in 1997 in a terrible flood that forced them to replace outdated equipment, like the old furnace. Other changes they made without catastrophic prompting, like renovating and redesigning the kitchen and creating a master suite out of the old master bedroom and an adjacent bedroom. Everything turned out very well and, oddly, the house retains the same ambiance it had when I lived there as a child.

It has always been a special house. My mother designed it for the needs of her large family and my father built it with the help of my brothers, a carpenter, and the carpenter's helper. It had nothing in common with typical tract homes of the 1950s. I'd venture that its New England saltbox silhouette is still unique in Grand Forks.

One of mother's special touches was a laundry chute from the upstairs bathroom through the first floor bathroom and then into a hamper in the basement bathroom adjacent to her laundry room. We may have carried clean laundry up the stairs, but we never had to carry it down!

Another special touch was in the kitchen. A set of cupboards hung above the dishwasher and sink, like a suspended island between the kitchen and dining room. The doors opened from both sides, so you could set the table in the dining room and unload the dishwasher in the kitchen and put the dishes in the same place. Also, the simple fact that we had three full bathrooms in 1959 was marvelous, but that is the one place where my mother missed the boat.

Four boys and one girl slept in upstairs bedrooms. Being the one girl had its perks, like my own bedroom (with very nice Ethan Allen furnishings because it was the guest room, too). The boys doubled up in two other bedrooms. The final two kids hadn't appeared yet, but when they eventually did, they slept in the extra bedroom downstairs until a few of us older kids grew up and left home, letting them "move up." But the upstairs had one big flaw, especially from my point-of-view - only one bathroom.

Mother had done quite a good job designing that bathroom. The commode and shower/tub had a locking door so you could have privacy without tying up the rest of the facilities. The main area had two sinks and lots of cabinet space for linens and storage. So far so good. But mother could have - dare I say should have? - divided it into two bathrooms, one off my bedroom and one off the hallway for the boys.

I admit I would have loved to have my own private bathroom for selfish reasons, but it was completely justifiable from a guest's standpoint, too. Many, many years later I asked Mother why she hadn't put two bathrooms upstairs. "It never occurred to me that you would need privacy. After all, you were only nine years old when we moved into that house," she told me. I have pictures of myself at that age and, with my flat chest, pigtails, and freckles, I admit young womanhood did not seem to be eminent, so I have to give Mother a pass on this.

Now that you have an idea about my state of mind relative to returning "home," I can move on to our activities. They included long walks on the beautifully-conceived flood plain greenway built after the terrible water disaster in '97, a fabulous photo exhibit at the North Dakota Fine Arts Museum, and a trip to an artist's studio in Alvarado, Minnesota that I had been planning for a long time.

I will move on to the activities, but not tonight. I need to pace myself or I'll be up too late and that will make it hard for me to get to my morning Artist Way group meeting. As the Mouseketeers used to say, "See you real soon!"

Ciao.

Frankie's Back!!

2009-09-01T20:25:00.002-05:00

Our missing kitten, Frankie S. (named for Frank Sinatra because he has big blue eyes) is back in the house. For those of you who don't know about the feral kittens I whispered into the house in June, Frankie and his two sisters lived with us for several weeks while we looked for homes for them. The sisters, Lovie and Little Bit, were adopted by our friends the Crawfords and they have new names to go with their new family. Frankie stayed with us, although it was not intended to be permanent.

Michael decided to take him to our vet for a feline leukemia test. We wanted to let him loose in the house and needed to be sure he wasn't a danger to our other cats. On the way to the car, Frankie discovered that the door of the crate was not latched securely and he made a break! Before Michael could even react, Frankie hit the pavement and bounded across the street.

We've had sightings off and on in the month since then. He regularly came to our house to eat, but we were not able to coax him back inside. This is where having our A/C break down worked out for the best. We have had the windows open to keep the air moving through the house. And Frankie showed up at the window to chat through the screen with Smudge, who is his half brother, soon after we opened them.

When we had the three kittens, they all loved Smudge and wanted cuddle up to him. Smudge took a somewhat dim view of this, possibly because it was three on one, but he seemed happy enough to have visits with Frankie through the screen window. (Perhaps Smudge's recent stay at Coffee and Casey's house while we were gone helped him to be more flexible, too.)

I decided to try to whisper Frankie back in the house. I fed him wet cat food through the back door and I sat near the food bowl when I put kibble out for him. As long as I didn't look at him, Frankie was willing to eat with me two feet away, although he did seem nervous. Michael started talking to him through the screen, too, and he didn't run away.

But Smudge did the whispering this time. We opened our back door a little, Smudge sat just inside the house and said hi to Frankie, and Frankie walked right in for some love. After his tail came inside, I simply closed the door. Voila! Frankie's back.

This should not be confused with "Frankie's happy to be inside." He is anxious about Michael and me, and Trixie is being mean and hissy to him (as she is with Smudge and even Jack sometimes). Jack, being king of the hill, ignores Frankie altogether. Smudge acts pretty nice towards him, though, and it is sweet to see Frankie snuggle up for a head washing from Smudge.

We don't kid ourselves that Frankie is a natural house cat. I doubt that wouldl work with him even if we wanted four cats inside. And I'm afraid he's too set in his ways to get adopted at this point. The plan is this: We will get Frankie neutered at our vet's and have his ear notched like they do for feral cats. Then Frankie can come and go as he pleases and be an outside cat at our house if inside is too scary. By notching his ear, we are certifying that he has been fixed and has had a rabies shot at least once, which should help if he is ever picked up by the authorities.

I like Frankie S. a lot and I am quite happy that Smudge whispered him back into our house. This time, we are going to get him taken care of with no escaping. After he's fixed and healed, we'll give him his freedom if he wants it. I'm fairly certain he will.

The rest of the vacation story will have to wait.

Ciao

Vacation Fun and Dead A/C Blues

2009-08-31T21:03:00.002-05:00

Arriving home from a really enjoyable vacation with family in lovely, cool weather to a Texas home that registers 93 degrees at 8:00 pm seems like a bad practical joke. Our first thought? Someone turned the heat on by accident. Okay, it seems far-fetched, but we did not want to face the possibility of our A/C unit being on the blink.

We have lived in this house for 17 years. We have replaced floors, repaired or replaced a variety of major appliances, installed new storage systems, and, thanks to Hurricane Ike, we had a new roof put on last December. Why are we surprised that our A/C compressor gave up the ghost?

I'm not surprised - I feel betrayed! If the compressor had to go out, how about when we were home, and on a Monday, when service is readily available? Perhaps the lesson here is don't come home from vacation on Friday night...

Okay. That's off my chest. I don't intend to waste anymore energy on the air conditioner than absolutely necessary.

Vacation this year had some very special elements to it. First, Michael and I traveled without children! What a lovely change. We started and stopped whenever we felt like it. No one asked "Are we there yet?". No one had urgent potty issues in the middle of nowhere. No one complained about the snacks we packed or whined for special treats. (All right, Michael may have whined for coffee once or twice, but he wasn't too bad.)

Second nice thing, we shared the driving and we didn't push ourselves. And that worked out so well. The first day we drove from home to Oklahoma City, arriving at dinner time. The trip takes about 7.5 hours. Since we wanted to visit the Oklahoma City Murrah Building National Memorial after dark, it worked out perfectly.

If you haven't ever visited Oklahoma City, I strongly recommend it as a destination. The OKC Memorial is one of the reasons. This is our third visit to the Memorial, the first being during it's construction. The designer did a fantastic job of conveying the solemnity and sorrow of this loss. Each lost life is represented by an empty chair which rests on a glass cube. During the day, the cubes seem to disappear and the chairs "float." At night, the individual cubes are lighted from within, creating a beautiful night-time scene. There are many other poignancies about the memorial, and I encourage you to check it out for yourself, preferably by visiting in person.

The second night out, we stopped in Omaha and spent the night with my brother and sister-in-law, Mark and Judi. We had the pleasure of a delicious family dinner with Mark & Judi and my niece Jenni and her family. Lots of conversation and a comfortable bed rounded out the evening. The third day turned out to be the hardest driving-wise. It took nine hours (including stops) to get from Omaha to Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Grand Forks is my hometown. Better yet, my sister Janet and her husband Dave live in the house we grew up in, so Michael and I got to sleep in my childhood bedroom. It seems to have shrunk since I left home in 1968! Janet and Dave bought the house when my dad took over the state public health department for North Dakota and he and my mother moved to Bismarck (state capitol). Mom designed the house and Dad built it with the help of a carpenter and my brothers in 1959. No one outside our family has ever owned it or lived in it and this summer is the house's 50 anniversary. That made our visit seem special.

Even more special - my parents were there on an extended stay. They are both elderly and my father is frail, so they rarely travel from their current home in Helena, Montana. In fact, most summers, we go to Helena to see them. Getting the chance to have my annual visit with Mom and Dad at Janet and Dave's house really made me happy. The icing on the cake? The weather was unseasonably cool in Grand Forks, actually requiring sweaters on occasion. Now that's a treat in August when you are from the Houston area!!

A lot of very interesting things happened while we visited Grand Forks - a fabulous photo exhibit at the North Dakota Fine Arts Museum, a field trip to Alvarado, Minnesota to buy handcrafted jewelry, the acquisition of a bass chime for the backyard. Yes, there is much to tell, but not tonight my dears.

I will pick up the story tomorrow if I don't have a heat stroke before then.

Ciao

Kittens with Attitude - Need Good Homes

2009-07-20T22:36:00.003-05:00

This is Kitten # 3, the only boy in the bunch. I caught him last and he is still a little scared, but when I pick him up, he snuggles up with me and purrs, purrs, purrs. I think this boy will make a nice house cat.
This is Kitten # 2. I practically snatched her out of midair as she was trying to climb over her brother to get to the food. As her number suggests, I caught her second. She is tinier than the others, but has a very assertive personality and doesn't let the "twins" bully her.
This is Kitten # 1. She stumbled into a trap we set to catch an adult feral for a trap-neuter-release event. We terrified her at first, but now she is tame and wants to be picked up and petted. If she doesn't get enough lap time, she lets us know it!

I have some video, too. Unfortunately, I haven't mastered the technique for getting it from my camera to the internet yet. I'm working on it.

These three darlings need homes soon. They are at a great stage for bonding with new owners. We took them to our vet for check-ups, baby shots, and deworming. They will need another baby shot in a bit, and, when they are 5 to 6 months old, they will have to be neutered. We can't rescue these babies from the hard, short life of a feral cat only to see them join the kitten production line in a few months.

So if you knows a nice person or family who would like a nice kitten, please contact me asap. If you contact me from the blog, remember that I can't reply to your comments directly, so you need to give me some kind of contact information.

Thanks for your good wishes for these kittens!

Ciao (or should I say Meow?)

Family Wellness Training Weekend

2009-06-27T22:12:00.003-05:00

I am beat from an intense weekend of training, but before I head off to bed, here's a brief rundown on the experience. Michael and I went to this training program because our friends at Lutheran Social Services of the South (LSSS) were sponsoring it and we have a great deal of respect for them. They have been instrumental in providing couples enrichment programs for adoptive parents of special needs children and we have learned so much attending their programs for the last few years.

In April, we were fortunate to be invited to attend a leadership training program for adoptive parents in the Hill Country, also sponsored by LSSS. Funding for marriage and family support programs is drying up in our bad economy, and LSSS is trying to recruit and develop people from the served communities to step in and help.

One of these programs is Twogether in Texas which is a premarital course that the state of Texas sponsors for engaged couples. The state fee for a marriage license is $60 and, by completing this 8-hour course, a couple can get that fee waived. Since Twogether in Texas is free to the participants, this is a good deal. The state also waives the usual waiting period after getting your marriage license. These incentives are designed to lure people into taking a class that can help them have a better marriage with better communications.

The program that Twogether in Texas uses is based on the "Family Wellness" training program. A couple of psychologists developed the program twenty years or so ago and it is widely used for couples education, family education, premarital education, etc. In fact, there are seven different Family Wellness curricula, all based on the same theoretical framework. Once you have graduated from the framework training, you can teach any of the seven classes.

We did not know this information when we showed up at the hotel Thursday morning. We expected our fellow attendees to be other adoptive parents. They weren't. Instead, the classes were filled with professionals from the community. They included clinical psychologists, MSW therapists, ministers, consultants, and a variety of private practitioners from all over the Southeast Texas area. We felt overwhelmed at first, as it appeared that we were the only "civilians" in the crowd.

We took it in stride, though, and joined into the training wholeheartedly. Family Wellness master trainers, Michelle and Joe Hernandez from California, did an excellent job of guiding us through the material for three days with the help of some other folks who were doing master trainer internships. We knew several of these people from their involvement in our post-adoptive services programs.

We learned the material and we learned how to instruct and coach others in the material. I can't say enough about how exciting the program is. Family Wellness concepts are deceptively simple and easily accessible, but it became clear to us in the first few hours of training that they were also enormously powerful. Since we have participated in quite a bit of couples/marriage enrichment programing through our post-adopt affiliations, we think we are good judges on these points.

I won't go into the training much more because I truly am tired. Three long days in the classroom, plus preparation time each night for our mock training sessions really took it out of me. (Each training team had to prepare and present a six to eight minute class from the material on Friday and on Saturday mornings.) My body doesn't tolerate that kind of abuse and my lupus is kicking into high gear tonight. I have a lot of joint pain, from my knuckles to my hips to my toes, plus tremendous fatigue. I will need to do a lot of extra sleeping for the next few days to get the beast back into its cage.

At the end of the day today, Michael and I graduated. We are now certified Family Wellness instructors. Because LSSS paid for our training and books, we have promised to present two free Family Wellness courses, one within 8 weeks and another within a year. The courses can be from any of the seven curricula. We will be looking for opportunities to fulfill this commitment, so if you have any suggestions for organizations or groups who could benefit from or would like to sponsor such training, please let us know.

More when I am rested.

Ciao!

"You are now free to move about the cabin."

2009-06-04T17:10:00.003-05:00

This morning at 10:00 A.M., a life-altering event took place. My youngest child, Victoria, graduated from high school. Dressed in a ruby red cap and gown, she and 16 other young people took the traditional walk across (in this case) the altar and received their diplomas from the University of Texas - University Charter School in Waco, Texas. As much as the day can be called a red-gown day for Victoria, it is a red-letter day for me.

I began parenting in 1974. (That's 35 years ago for those of you who don't do math in your head. I didn't have to do the math because my oldest child turned 35 last week.) 23 years-old at the time of Alexandra's birth, I attended graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis. I had been supporting myself since I turned 18 and left home for college, and I certainly felt grown-up and ready for parenting. While I didn't count on my first marriage ending so precipitously, making me a single parent, I managed well-enough for the two and a half years before I married Michael and got some help.

I felt grown-up and ready for parenting; after all, I had been taking care of myself for years. Attending college and graduate school at private universities required an enormous effort on my part because I paid my own way -for tuition, for books and fees, for housing, food, and anything else I needed. My parents did not approve of my choice to leave home for college and made supporting me conditional on attending the local university. I could not conceive of staying in my small town when a whole unexplored world beckoned.

This parting of the ways made me an emancipated youth at a time when normal emancipation happened at 21, not 18. Voting happened at 21, not 18, for that matter. Many colleges required parental permission for student s to stay out past midnight, among other arcane rules of the dark ages. And even today, it is damned hard to be classified as emancipated in the eyes of the federal government's financial aid machine.

Why does any of this matter? And what does it have to do with Victoria's graduation?

Being busy educating myself from the ages of 18 to 24 and busier raising children from the ages 23 to 58, I missed out on opportunities to explore the very world I left home for so eagerly. When I talk with my peers and compare notes on the 60s and 70s, I hear some common themes. Hitchhiking around Europe or taking the Grand Tour with nothing but a knapsack and a Eur-rail pass is one. Attending the moratorium march on Washington to end the Vietnam war is another. Hanging out in Haight-Ashbury (that's San Francisco and hippiedom for you youngsters) is another.

I also did not join the Peace Corps and go to Africa or South America. I did not join VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) and go to Appalachia or urban ghettoes to change the world, although I did do volunteer work and hang out with official VISTA volunteers. I did not go on any civil rights marches or voter registration drives in the South, although I actually wasn't old enough for much of that action. I don't feel bad about admitting that I did not drop out or drop acid. I managed to cross the borders of Canada and Mexico a few times, but usually under the most mundane of circumstances.

Again you may be asking: Why does any of this matter? And what does it have to do with Victoria's graduation? Just this - I am now free of responsibility for anyone. Victoria will surely need guidance at times, but won't want it or accept it for several more years if my experience with Alexandra and Nicholas holds true. Michael is responsible for himself and as happy to be a free spirit as I am. Okay, there are the cats, but providing for them is reasonably uncomplicated.

I am now free to move about the cabin on the jumbo jet of life. I have dreams that have been delayed for 35 years. I have plans that were put on the backburner when people cooked on cast iron stoves. I have a closet full of some days that can actually become todays. I have firsts waiting for me that I never thought I would accomplish - First visit to Costa Rica. First trip to the U.K. First Grand Tour of Europe. First stay in an Italian villa. First idyll on a Caribbean beach. First .... the list goes on and on.

Watch out world, here I come.

Ciao

May Baskets, Markie, and Me OR It's Never a Good Idea to Jump Out of the Second Story Window

2009-04-30T21:39:00.005-05:00

We had lovely celebrations on May Day during my childhood. On May 1 each year, we would make May Baskets for our friends. May Baskets usually were decorated cupcake papers, or perhaps something stronger, with a handle made out of twisted pipe cleaners. Into these little baskets went a variety of small candies, maybe a posy of flowers, and a name tag.

The really special thing about May Baskets stemmed from the stealth and secrecy of planting them on someone's front doorstep, ringing the bell, then slipping away without being caught. I remember making the baskets of treats up with my mother's assistance. (Okay, she did most of the work and I probably just got in her way, but I was little and doing my best.)

We would fill up a 13x9 cake pan with the May Baskets and take off around the neighborhood to drop them off. Maybe the mothers coordinated their timing, but I don't ever remember running into anyone else while delivering my May Baskets. Nevertheless, I always got May Baskets in return.

One year, when I was five or six, my neighborhood Markie Hall (a year younger than me) gave me a wonderful May Basket that I still have all these years later. It is about four inches tall, with a handle that rises another three or four inches above the basket. The basket had a paper doily as a liner and I'm sure it was filled with candy, but the little woven basket in and of itself made me so happy that I don't remember much more about it.

Markie's parents owned a flower shop and perhaps the wicker basket was just a run-of-the-mill item to them. Or maybe not. I have no idea if anyone else got such a lovely little basket and it would probably have been a topic of conversation among the preschool set, so he might have had "special feelings" for me.

I know we played together a lot. He had no siblings and no prospects of any, being the only child of a middle-aged couple who had not been able to have other children.

Aside: I knew this by eavesdropping on my mother's bridge club and at various other womanly get-togethers. A favorite trick of mine was to sit under the card table - which had a very proper, long tablecloth on it - and dig around in the ladies' purses while enjoying their conversations above me. This lasted until the day I applied a lipstick I found under the table in someone's purse to my own face, without a mirror, and then reappeared among the ladies looking like a clown. Please remember, we're talking preschool here!!

I, on the other hand, had way too many siblings for my own good, namely three big brothers who picked on me and made my life miserable most of the time. Someday I'll tell you about the candy rocks that weren't candy or brushing my teeth with Brylcream before I learned to read. (Which may be why I became an early reader.) Be that as it may, Markie and I found each other and played happily together even though he was a boy.

One summer afternoon when I was six, Markie and I ended up in the boys' room upstairs. The boys' room consisted of a raised attic with a dormitory-like sleeping area, a large study area, and a small bathroom. My dad had built it when he and my mother moved in to their new, two-bedroom bungalow with three children and one on the way. I can't remember why Markie and I had headed upstairs. It got hot up there in the summer and my brothers would probably not have been very happy to find out we had been playing in their territory. Maybe that was the appeal.

But there we were - Markie, me, and a window overlooking our side yard. Naturally, we got the bright idea to play "parachute." I don't recall ever playing parachute before then, or hearing of anyone playing parachute. I don't recall if it was my idea or Markie's or just the devil taking the opportunity to screw with a couple of kids. But we did get the idea that it would be fun to make a parachute and jump out of the second floor window of my house.

How do you make a parachute when you are five- and six-years-old respectively? Why, you use the boy's tee-shirt, of course! Markie took off his shirt, climbed up onto the window ledge, held the tee-shirt over his head, and jumped. The moment his feet left the window sill, I knew with utter and absolute clarity that it had not been such a good idea. I knew it so clearly that I didn't even watch the results, I simply turned away and found a hiding place behind my brothers' dresser.

It felt like I stayed hidden for a very long time. I figured Markie had died, I would follow shortly, and there was no reason to rush things by giving myself up; however, when my mother came to the foot of the stairs and called me, I went to her as meekly as a lamb to the slaughter.

Surprisingly, I didn't get into trouble. When I asked my mother years later how I escaped punishment that day, she told me that I looked so terrified when I came downstairs, she didn't think spanking me was necessary.

Markie did not die. He didn't even break anything. He may not even have gotten grass stains on his clothes. He did have the wind knocked out of him, which actually feels awful, as I discovered myself about thirty years later. And he earned absolutely stellar bragging rights. No one, I mean not even the biggest lunkhead boy on the block, had ever jumped out of a second story window on purpose!

I can't remember if we played together after that. I'm thinking that if his mother had anything to say about it, Markie shifted his attentions to safer playmates, like my older brothers. And, thinking that, I'm also now pretty sure I got the wicker basket from him when I was five ...

Happy May Day one and all!!

Ciao

A Moment of Grace

2009-04-14T14:33:00.003-05:00

April 12, 2009 marked the 30th anniversary of a calamitous loss
for Michael and me. This is my recollection of that event.

The most astonishing thing about tragedy is the amount of time a split second can take. Awake, but not up, I heard a sound like a rifle report at 6:10 a.m. and looked up to see a crack of blue sky at the top of my bedroom wall, where it met the ceiling. Without another thought, I shook my sleeping husband.

"Get up! The house is falling in," I yelled.

He got up immediately, without questioning me, and we ran for the third floor, where our 4-year-old daughter and 3-month-old son were asleep. Both of us wore almost nothing, and I grabbed my robe, belt missing, as we ran.

Holding my robe closed with the baby, I started back down the two flights of stairs to the front door. At the first landing, I realized my husband had not followed.

"Come on," I yelled in panic, "we have to get out of here."

For the first time, I could see the doubt in his eyes about my conviction of imminent demise.

"I'm not going anywhere without my pants on," he said categorically.

I replied by taking my daughter's hand from his, and, in my heart, abandoning him to his foolish pride and his fate.

At the front stoop, I stopped to bang on our neighbor's apartment door. I knew that Jack, the husband, would be gone to work, and that Kitty would already be busy with housework. As she opened the door, I warned her that we had to get away because the house was falling in. Kitty gave me an incredulous look and then staunchly refused to leave without her purse. As she walked back into the apartment, I followed, grabbing her telephone to call 911. My pounding heart made my fingers awkward and my voice breathy, but I managed to dial and to ask for the fire department. In the seconds it took for the St. Louis Fire Department emergency dispatcher to answer, I forced myself to calm down so I could speak clearly.

"I live at 2348 South 12th Street and my house is falling in."

I hung up the phone and walked back to the front door. Kitty stood behind me with her purse, urging me to put on her slippers against the cold April air. I had not even realized that my feet were bare. Slipping them on in Kitty’s doorway, I looked at the beautiful blue sky and the antique blue and white tile inlaid on the porch of our reclaimed tenement house. I thought about how the tenants living in the apartment beneath us had just moved out in a pique because we did not want them to keep their mange-ridden dog after we had our new baby. I thought about my husband, whom I had not seen since my flight down the front stairs. And I thought about what I would say when a fire truck showed up in front of my perfectly fine, about-to-be-renovated, 150-year-old home.

I thought about all these things in a flash, and then, in another flash, the wall across the porch from us melted into a black cloud of dirt and grit. I turned away, sheltering my children from the choking cloud and myself from the anguish raining down with the dirt. As soon as the collapse seemed over, I grabbed my daughter’s hand once more, clutched my infant son closer to my bosom, and ran past a 20-foot cascade of bricks that had been my absent neighbor's bedroom and my front yard. I ran down the sidewalk and through our gate into the safety of the empty, dawn street.

Standing on the cold cobblestones, I screamed for Kitty, who had turned back, and screamed again when she still didn’t come, fearing that the rest of the house would collapse any minute. I listened to the wailing of an approaching fire truck. The next-door neighbors ran out to investigate what had thrown them from their beds. It was the collision of three courses of old brick, three stories high, two rooms deep, against their house as our sidewall collapsed across the four-foot gangway we shared with them. The collapse that began with the sound of a gunshot at 6:10 a.m. and finished in a cloud of grit and dirt at 6:14 a.m.

Those four minutes seemed like an eternity to me. They gave me enough time to save what I loved the most, my children. They gave me enough time to warn my dear neighbor, Kitty, who finally came away from the danger after checking her stove. They gave me enough time to call for help and to doubt myself. They even gave my skeptical husband enough time to put on his pants, take the dogs out the back way, and run for his life when the wall crashed into the gangway just as he stepped into it to investigate. Those four minutes gave me enough time to capture a moment of grace that served me well when reality took over.

We had planned to renovate our old, four-family flat into a gracious home with two apartments for income. The architects and professional engineer that we had hired to design the renovation were young, enthusiastic, inexpensive, and, we discovered too late, inexperienced. Our professionals dismissed a small, ground-level separation between the floor and exterior wall, discovered on a recent walk-through of the project, with a simple and easy answer.

"We'll just need to reinforce the foundation with concrete," one of them said.

Unfortunately, everyone underestimated the urgency of the problem, and before the engineer and architects had even planned the remedial measures, that wall collapsed, taking a second wall with it.

30 years should be enough time to recover from grief, but I still choke up when memories of that day surface. My recollections usually stem from news reports of similar tragedies. Once, hearing a woman describe the engulfing, smoke-like wave of dirt and soot she experienced in a wall collapse in Houston, I broke into tears, engulfed myself in the billowing, choking dirt that remains one of my most vivid memories of our loss.

When I look at the tall townhouses springing up around our city, I see my four-year-old daughter’s green bed ruffle fluttering at the edge of a three-story precipice that had been the wall she was sleeping next to only four minutes before it appeared. Entering unfamiliar spaces, I glance up, automatically assessing where danger might lie, and seat myself carefully away from anything suspended from the ceiling, unable to forget that what seems solid can become, in as little as four minutes, a pile of debris. And when I look at my children, now 34- and 30-years-old, I am swept back into that moment, standing on cold cobblestones in a belt-less bathrobe, clutching one child’s hand, and pressing the other child’s swaddled body into my own. I am swept back into that moment when I encountered grace.

Thoughts on Saying "Uncle"

2009-04-03T15:18:00.004-05:00

Since the kitten Smudge entered our home on December 27, 2008, I have observed quite intriguing feline behavior. Jack and Trixie, our 15 year old cats, do not like Smudge, who wants nothing more than a playmate. Apparently bad attention is better than no attention, so Smudge behaves like an obnoxious brat to the older cats. He will pounce on the cats' tails as they whip back and forth in annoyance; he will spring out from under the dust ruffle of our bed at an unsuspecting cat; he will leap up where another cat is settled peacefully and practically land them.

Jack has achieved an equanimity about it. He and Smudge play fight, rising up on their haunches and bopping each other soundly with their front paws, no claws extended. Jack towers over Smudge and outweighs him by ten pounds, but he's the one who usually walks away from their encounters.

Trixie is another matter all together. She is a very timid cat. Many of my friends have never seen Trixie because she stays on my bed or hides when we have company. After 14 and a half years of carefully cultivated association, she has sat on my lap three or four times maximum. She loves to be petted by me or one of our immediate family members, but if you pick her up, she leans away from your body as far as she can until you put her down. This said, Trixie is very attached to me and apparently very jealous of Smudge in addition to annoyed by him.

Trixie has gone overboard expressing her feelings. She hisses, snarls, lunges and otherwise threatens Smudge ... and Jack ... and us if Smudge is close to us. For years I have been protecting Trixie from Jack's aggressiveness - he outweighs her by nearly as much as he outweighs Smudge - and suddenly she has Jack on the run from her slashing claws and gnashing fangs.

Now comes the really fascinating part. Whenever the atmosphere gets too intense - Jack throws an extra hard punch or Trixie corners him - Smudge flops onto his side and presents himself helplessly, belly exposed, to their teeth and claws. And immediately, the aggression stops. I have heard of submissive behavior in animals before, but observing it is different. A snarling, hissing cat just stops, looks, and walks away? Yes, indeed.

This made me think about human relationships. As a naive 18-year-old from a small city, I vividly remember the first time I witnessed random violence. I was riding a city bus in St. Louis that had a short layover at a big stop in a seedy, industrial area. Two men were at the bus stop (among other people) and I saw one of the men attack the other. In short order, the second man had been beaten viciously enough to be on the ground and no longer even protecting himself. The winner - if that can be called winning - then proceeded to kick the other fellow in the stomach several times before deciding to quit.

Back on the bus, I practically vomited in disgust and terror, but no one else seemed to take much notice other than to walk in the opposite direction of the attack. I kept waiting for someone to intervene and help the injured man, but no one did. When my bus pulled away from the stop, the victim was stirring, but had not yet gotten up and still, no one helped him.

So, it would seem that cats (and other "dumb" animals) know how to say "Uncle and what that means, but human beings don't. How could we have missed out on such an important biological imperative?

Do you remember, as a child, that you could get a bully to stop beating on you by saying "uncle?" In fact, making someone say "uncle" often motivated the attack in the first place. But once you said it, the pain stopped; you might slink off in humiliation with taunts at your back, but no one kicked you when you were down. If they had, the crowd would have turned on them with derision for such craven behavior.

So kids do it and cats do it, but adults don't do it. Hmmm, could it be that we actually teach kids not to be merciful or relent in their assault on someone else?

This morning, when Smudge flopped over yet again into kitty submission, I tried to imagine Trixie then attacking his exposed underbelly and ripping it out with her fangs - the cat equivalent to kicking the s**t out of someone who is down - and the picture just wouldn't come together. It's not going to happen.

Wouldn't it be lovely if humans could be as evolved as cats?

Ciao.

Miscel-Lanie: Feral Cats, Art Exhibits, Ballet, Theatre, Etc.

2009-03-20T15:12:00.004-05:00

Some weeks are crazy. Go, go, go. Busy, busy, busy. But even most crazy weeks are not like the one I've just had. It started last Saturday. I finally managed all the arrangements to capture Mom - our feral cat friend - and have her spayed. Except for one little problem. No way was Mom going into our trap, thank you very much. What we found in the trap early Saturday morning was Dad, the male cat who Smudge looks just like. Well, a neutered feral cat of any gender is a blessing, so we took Dad to SNAP (Spay and Neuter Assistance Program) to be fixed.

Michael and I then zoomed home and did some housework before changing into good clothes and heading back into town. First, we attended an Artist Talk at the gallery show of our friend Lillian Warren. Lillian's new work at the Rudolph Projects | Artscan Gallery impressed me a lot. Titled "Here is Nowhere," the art explores the landscape of contemporary America with all it's sameness and anonymity.

Originally photographed or videotaped, often from within a car, the scenes have an "anywhere" feel to them. Those could be electrical lines anywhere; highway overpass buttresses anywhere; highway signs anywhere; street scenes anywhere. For me, this gives the paintings the feeling of being everywhere. Each scene looked like someplace I have been although I can't quite put my finger on where it is. The colors in the paintings are subtle, mostly early evening or early morning colors, dusky or smoky, full of purples and roses and soft blues. Everything identifiable is slightly fuzzed out, adding to the sense of everywhere-ness.

After a lively discussion with Lillian and her gathered admirers, Michael and I moved on to Gallery 3 at the Winter Street Studios where our friend Piyali Sen Das Gupta has a show mounted. Piyali, hosting an open gallery, greeted us when we arrived. Her current show features her dog, Scooby, a basset hound I have had the pleasure of meeting in person. "The Dog Stories," as she titles her exhibit, features much more than a dog; it is the story of the conjunction of a woman's life and a dog's life and how the dog fits into and enlivens the woman's milieu. The paintings are whimsical, brightly colored, and enchanting. Scooby is always somewhere in the art, always looking up from his short, basset hound position with soulful, adoring eyes at the woman or the viewer.

Although she also has drawings and prints in the show, Piyali primarily hung paintings done in egg tempera. I have learned a bit about egg tempera from Piyali over the years and admire her work even more because of the demanding nature of that medium. Egg tempera paintings take a great deal of time and layer after layer of paint that has been hand mixed using perishable egg yolks. If you haven't seen the exhibit, hurry and get over there before it comes down at the end of March. It is well worth the effort.

We visited several studios on our way out of Winter Street, discovering something to enjoy in each one. Then we grabbed a bite to eat, picked up Dad from the clinic, returned our rented live trap, and then made a beeline for home. Once there, we set Dad up with food, water, a bed, and the surgery-required litter of non-irritating shredded newspaper in our shed for safe keeping, not that he appreciated the effort much. Back into the car as fast as possible, we sped down the highway to the Wortham Theatre for a performance of the Houston Ballet.

Luckily, we managed to get there for most of the dance talk, an informative presentation on some aspect of ballet that the company offers to patrons before each performance. The show, "Masters of Movement," featured three short ballets: The Leaves are Fading, The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude and Soldiers' Mass. I found The Leaves are Fading" to be the least interesting. Very pretty and romantic to the point of sentimentality, it went on too long for me. Without drama, I became bored, although I loved the flowing, gauzy costuming.

"Vertiginous" lived up to its title in every way. A new word for me, vertiginous required a trip to the dictionary when we returned home. It means "having or causing a whirling sensation; liable to falling," and that is exactly what the performers delivered, an on-the-edge thriller with five dancers who remained in motion every minute of their time on stage. Lasting only twelve minutes, it seemed to go on forever (in a good way) and left me breathless and wondering where the dancers' stamina came from. The final piece, "Soldiers' Mass" moved me to tears. Featuring an all-male cast, it recreated the experience of a unit of soldiers who all died in their first battle on the first day of World War I.

It took me until the Kyrie Eleison was sung to realize that the music actually was a mass. It had been written to commemorate these very deaths and then later choreographed by Jirí Kylián. The dancing was superb and the fear, suffering, and bravery of the doomed soldiers came across beautifully. As you might guess, "Soldiers' Mass" gets my vote as the best of the three, although the Houston Ballet did each one beautifully.

After the ballet, we headed home and turned in because we had more excitement ahead on Sunday - a play at the Alley. This performance - "The Man Who Came to Dinner" - had us belly laughing. The actors' performances were collectively excellent and some individuals were absolutely superb. Which ones, you ask? Well, go see the show and find out for yourself! (Hint: the Alley's rep company regulars outdo themselves in this production.)

I intended to catch up on my week, but find myself pooped after Saturday and Sunday. I guess my readers will have to wait for me to catch my breath before they hear anymore.

Ciao.

Going Green or How I Became Irish

2009-03-13T15:16:00.003-05:00

The immigrants who settled North Dakota, my birthplace and home, came primarily from Scandinavia and Europe, with a smattering of French fur traders tossed into the mix. Thus, my Swedish paternal grandfather – Johann Sven Gustafson - and my Alsatian grandmother – Frances Froelich. I grew up in a Catholic family and attended Catholic schools bursting at the seams with the burgeoning baby-boomer generation, but even in a Catholic setting, the Irish had little presence in my life. My classmates had names like Budzeak, Chaput (pronounced Shep-ee), Eisner, Garceau, Kroeber, Prochaska, and Lizakowski.

Exposure to names like these from an early age, besides bestowing on me a facility with hard to pronounce or spell surnames, also forever marked me as an outsider in places like Houston. You see, I grew up pronouncing the oe combination with the German “A” sound, as in Fray-lick (Froelich) and Kray-ber (Kroeber,) whereas Houstonians pronounce it with the “O” sound. People are always correcting me, but I stubbornly cling to my linguistic heritage.

Back to my classroom. I will allow that one or two Anglo-Saxon names cropped up – Houlihan and Higgins come to mind – but overall, the Irish just hadn’t made much of a mark on day-to-day life in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Even today, the population with Irish ancestry in my home state hovers around seven percent.

St. Patrick’s Day had nothing to do with green beer, Irish stew, leprechauns, or parades. Instead, we celebrated it from the vantage point of our teachers, the nuns, who proudly told us that Ireland had no snakes because of St. Patrick and his miracles.

If you have seen the play “Doubt,” the movie “Doubt,” or even the trailer for the movie “Doubt,” you have an inkling of my life as a Catholic schoolgirl. Meryl Streep’s performance terrifies, but at least we know she’s acting.

My first teacher at St. Mary’s Elementary School – which I didn’t get into until second grade because of baby boom overcrowding – had the rolls-off-your-tongue moniker of Sister Theodosia. Sister Theodosia earned my unending opprobrium when she decided to give me a new name. My actual given name is Mary Lane, but my family only called me Lanie. My mother can’t explain why she saddled me with Mary at all, but, by age seven, I really didn’t think the name had anything to with me.

Sr. Theodosia, on the other hand, being certain that Lane was not a saint’s name, refused to use it and insisted on calling me Mary. Naturally, I ignored her, thinking she meant one of the many other Marys in my class of 40. Let’s see: we had Mary Margaret, Mary Ann, Mary Catherine, Mary Ellen, and three just plain Marys. I thought she should have been relieved to have at least one student whose name was unique, but she would have none of it.

It is terrible to be in trouble on your very first day at your new school when you are really a good little girl. It may even account for some of my life-long foibles. My mother tried to reason with Sister Theodosia, but the best she could negotiate for me was Mary Lane, which rolls off the tongue as Marralane. I hated it, and I hated Sister Theodosia, but I suffered it until I turned sixteen and my rebellious side blossomed. Then I reclaimed Lane and later managed, by a clever arrangement with my maiden name, to ditch Mary forever.

Now, I know you are wondering what this has to do with “Going Green or How I Became Irish.” Just this: As a nice Swedish girl from the North Dakota, I had little or no point of reference for Irish-ness. Then I landed in St. Louis for college, and, as it turned out, stayed for a lot more fun.

St. Louis is kind of the anti-North Dakota as far as the Irish go. For one thing, they started going there early, in the 18^th century, welcomed by the French, with whom they had waged a futile war against England and with whom this particular bunch of Irish folk were co-religionists. And they kept coming because the people in St. Louis treated them a lot better than the people on America’s Eastern Seaboard did.

Coming from an area populated largely by blue-eyed, blond-haired people, the incidence of red hair, green eyes, and freckles in St. Louis astonished me. Not to mention the number of Catholic churches - one on every corner it seemed. Suddenly, St. Patrick’s Day had MEANING in capital letters. There were parades, there were hats, there were tee shirts, there was green beer and Irish stew, and there were buttons that said “Kiss me; I’m Irish.”

The name Gustafson closed the door on pretending to be Irish, but I enjoyed the beer, the parades, and the antics of the Irish all around me. To me it seemed as gaudy and over the top as Mardi Gras does today. It’s fun to watch, but I’m not taking my shirt off for plastic beads, thank you very much.

By skipping over nearly a decade of my life in St. Louis, we come to the significant part. In January of 1976, I met an appealing, redheaded, green-eyed fellow whose name and family, it turned out, were decidedly Irish. That December I married him and found myself suddenly Irish. As if to prove the point, our friends Steffie and Lenny Marks even gave us a set of Irish coffee goblets as a wedding present which we use to this day.

The very next St. Patrick’s Day I found myself at the Buel Street Pub with a mug of green beer, wearing a green tee shirt that said, “Kiss Me, I’m Irish,” and shouting “Erin go Braugh” although I had no idea what it meant. It turns out going green is easy once you get over being Swedish.

Marie: An Incomparable Ballet

2009-03-02T21:38:00.003-06:00

On Saturday night, Michael and I attended the Houston Ballet's production of a brand-new ballet: Marie. Choreographed by Stanton Welch, the HB's artistic director since Ben Stevenson retired, Marie is a stunning production the caliber of Cleopatra.

I began attending the Houston Ballet in 1992 with my friend and co-worker Irene Duke. Daughter Alexandra joined us somewhere along the line, then Irene got busy and dropped out of our season ticket group. Alex and I attended together for many years, but eventually she too found it hard to fit into her schedule. For a while I bought two tickets and invited one of my friends to join me so I wouldn't be alone. I really tried to get Michael interested, but he resisted.

Occasionally, when there was a fabulous ballet, I could get him to attend with me and we developed an accord about attending performances. Each season, we go through the schedule and select four of the contemporary, mixed program type performances to attend on a mini-subscription. Michael doesn't care for the story ballets and, over 18 years, I have seen most of them more than once, so I can take them or leave them. But the contemporary programs, which often feature new work, give you three different experiences in one evening. They are often cutting-edge in terms of costuming and stylization, and they are frequently set to music no one associates with ballet, such as Moby or The Kronos Quartet.

So, for the last couple of years, Michael and I have enjoyed our four performances per season of the Houston Ballet, making a date of it on Saturday night instead of attending on Sunday afternoons like I used to. This year's contemporary performances have been outstanding. In addition, we attended the performance of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal as well as the Jubilee of Dance, an annual, one-evening extravaganza featuring the best of everything from the Houston Ballet.

We picked Marie for this year's tickets because it was a world premiere. Welch's new works showcased in the contemporary performances have been excellent and we wanted to see what he would do with this story. The run-up hype for the show referenced the recent movie about Marie Antoinette, but we hadn't seen that, so we really had no other concept of Marie Antoinette than the "let them eat bread" stuff that always portrayed her as an uncaring, unenlightened snob.

The Saturday morning Chronicle review of the opening night performance gave us our first clue that the story would take a different tack and portray the queen in a sympathetic way. We arrived early enough to attend the regular pre-show dance talk, which Nancy Wozny, an old friend of mine, gave. Nancy had as her guest one of the costuming department's top people. They discussed the intricacies of crafting this ballet and demonstrated the lengths Welch and his team went to to get all the details just right by displaying a huge book of notes and sketches just for the character of Marie. Nancy also informed us about some of the little known history of Marie Antoinette. Reading the performance notes in the program put the icing on the cake. By the time the curtain rose, I had already been convinced that everything I knew about Marie Antoinette was biased and libelous.

Moments into the performance, I no longer cared about any of that. I became totally engrossed in the story unfolding before my eyes - and my ears, for that matter. The use of Shostakovich to score the dance was perfect. The music lacked the signals that the "made-for-ballet" compositions include to elicit knee-jerk reactions from the audience. Shostakovich's music blended subtly with the dance, partnered it rather than leading it.

And the dance itself - simply exquisite. From the confusion of two sheltered youths who had not a clue how to consummate their marriage to the raucous excesses of a libertine court to the terror of the revolution and the pathos of the royal family's deaths, the choreography could not have matched more perfectly. We had the privilege of seeing Melody Herrera dance the lead role. She performed with an understated command of the role, capturing and reflecting back to the audience the myriad qualities that made up this complex girl/woman. We saw her as a joyful child Marie; as an overwhelmed and frightened maiden Marie; as a madcap libertine Marie, and as a womanly Marie with a lover. We saw her terror, then her fortitude, when the revolution swept her family into danger and prison. But most of all, we saw HER with compassion and sorrow.

I have never attended a ballet that left me weeping until I went to Marie. I have been awed, as in the pas de deux in Don Quixote. I have been baffled and put off, as by the ballet Cruel Garden about Frederico Lorca. I have laughed at the antics in Coppelia and marveled at the staging in Cleopatra. But Marie simply reduced me to tears and I couldn't stop leaking them for quite a long time after the curtain closed. I went to the Green Room to congratulate Ms. Herrera and barely got the words out without losing it again.

Why did this ballet affect me so much? I think that the combination of choreography and music, plus the authentic and heartfelt performance of Melody Herrera, put this ballet over the top into a world-class category. I imagine it will be performed over and over as the years go by because it is just that good. And I will be pleased to be one of those who saw it during it's debut run.

If you like dance, then you must go see this ballet now. I suspectshows are going to sell out as word gets around - if they haven't already. So don't dawdle, balletophiles. Buy your tickets now. Buy the best seats you an afford and if they aren't up close and personal, bring your opera glasses along. There are subtleties in this ballet that you won't want to miss!

Ciao

P.S. My next blog will be about the First International Convocation of Unitarian Universalist Woman and Progressive Woman of Faith.

An Artistic Weekend

2009-02-23T13:05:00.004-06:00

I had such an inspiring, artistic weekend. On Saturday, Michael, Alexandra, and I attended the gallery show at STUDIO2315. The building houses many artist studios, but we were there particularly to support friends Carol Watson and Luisa Duarte-Green.

Carol works in the fiber arts, primarily constructing wearable art clothing. More recently, she has added beautiful paintings and drawings, fiber collages, and other visual arts to her creative oeuvre. Carol's studio itself is a work of art, thoughtfully and exquisitely adorned with her art, where beautifully clothed mannequins interact visually with watercolor and ink drawings. Her studio has both a small gallery space and a workshop space, but the inviting workshop is artful, too.

Walking into the building's main gallery, Carol's 10-foot high, fabric collage banner immediately commands your eye and makes a stunning impact. The complexity of the banner is not apparent until you come close and see the variety of stitches, fabrics, and assemblage it contains. The surprise is that behind this huge piece of art is more of Carol's work. She has two enrobed mannequins in the big gallery along with the collage banner.

Luisa primarily paints in watercolor, but is by no means limited to that medium. An architect by training and an ex-pat of Maracaibo, Venezuela, Luisa's work is imbued with hot, tropical colors and well-defined structural elements, often stacked on each other into tall building-like constructs. Luisa's watercolors are mostly vivid and deep-hued with rich colors, although she has also painted a somber and moving series in shades of gray that reflect her mourning after the untimely death of her husband Peter last year. The power of this muted series does not surprise me because I have also seen Luisa's Stations of the Cross collage series which is equally dramatic and powerfully engaging.

Aside: When I commented on her dazzling palette, Luisa told me, "These are the colors of my city." Then she showed me photographs of houses in Maracaibo and I immediately recognized her inspiration.

In addition to the mourning series, the STUDIO2315 gallery features three new works Luisa completed in 2009. They are large and exuberant versions of the smaller works in her studio in which mere towers become skyscrapers filled with iconic elements to surprise and intrigue the viewer. Luisa's work embodies a lightness that makes the objects seem to float while her structural elements anchor them firmly to the ground.

As if Carol and Luisa's art works were not prize enough for our long trek from the burbs, we found wonderful work in studio after studio of the STUDIO2315 artists. Anne Delpine's delicately colored collage/paintings intrigued and seduced me into looking closer and closer to discover the building blocks she had used to create them, including dictionary pages with words and illustrations. My favorite piece was inspired by a tiny dictionary drawing of a sea urchin, and I felt so pleased with myself that I actually recognized the sea urchin as a "real thing" even through Anne's complex and intricate stylizing. See if you can identify this piece on Anne's website.

Next door to Anne's studio, I discovered Charles Jones, a master print maker and bookbinder who teaches at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. Charles had a table full of his exquisitely bound books which he generously shared with us. Each book had compelling content, including reflections on the war in Vietnam by two artists who fought on opposite sides in the same area at the same time (Charles and a Vietnamese artist friend). Another book paid homage to great artists of the 19th and 20th centuries with poetry and prints. Yet another memorialized the life and works of a young German woman whose death would otherwise have silenced. I could go on, because I love hand bound books, but I must restrain myself. Charles also had wonderful, nearly life-sized prints of literary figures displayed around the studio he shares with his wife, Corinne Jones.

At the last stop of our pilgrimage around STUDIO2315, we met Kia Gardner, who makes lovely crystal and gemstone jewelry. Her space is tucked in the back, down a hallway, and might easily be missed. Be sure to look for her behind the red door at the end of a beautifully painted red and white faux carpet.

To cap our weekend of artistic adventure, Michael and I attended a performance at the Alley Theatre of Eurydice by Susan Ruhl, who also wrote The Clean House, which we saw (and loved) last year. In Eurydice, Ruhl created, from the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a stirring and poignant tale of love, loss, and regret. Although the story seems to be about the young lovers, Orpheus and Eurydice, I found myself most affected by the bonds of father and daughter in this retelling. The staging wowed me - shower heads streaming water, extensive walkways, an old-fashioned water pump (with running water, of course), and an elevator (probably not a working model, but the illusion held up well) - Eurydice was a visual cornucopia. Michael and I have season tickets to the Alley and our seats for the Neuhaus Stage (their smaller, more flexible venue) are in the front row south. We are quite often practically members of the cast because of this. With a walkway just inches from our seats, this performance felt very intimate.

Aside: This worked to our disadvantage last year in the famously gory, gross, and gruesome play The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh that featured a man hanging upside down being tortured. His "rig" - with him hanging from it - rolled by me about 6 inches from my right elbow. It did not delight me in the least.

We topped our weekend of artistic pursuits off with the Academy Awards. It may not be art, but at least now we have some idea which of the movies we missed last year are worth the effort to see this year, even if we have to view them on the small screen.

Ciao

Trying to be Laid Back about being Laid Off

2009-02-09T13:02:00.004-06:00

I frequently think about blog topics in the middle of the night, or when I'm driving, or sitting in a waiting room - times when actually writing the blog would be very inconvenient or impossible. Now that I am sitting at my actual computer, I find that my mind is a blank and all the interesting items I thought about mere wisps in the ether. So I will meander through several current topics by way of update and see if, perhaps, one of them prompts a lost memory to return.

Michael lost his job in January. We had premonitions as early as October when, after an initial round of lay-offs, a senior manager said something to the effect that everyone left was safe until after Christmas. Michael came home that evening and told me he had 55 days of guaranteed employment. It cast a bit of a pall over our preparations for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. On December 22, his boss confirmed that the lay-offs were going to happen in January and that Michael would be one of the hundreds affected. We did not want to put the kibosh on anyone else's Christmas fun, so we kept that news to ourselves and even after Christmas only told a few people. I suppose we hoped it wouldn't really happen, but it did.

We have been through this before and know how to batten down the hatches and live lean, but it is discouraging to have to do so again so late in Michael's work life. Another five years and he could actually retire, but those five years of work between now and then are important to our plans for retirement. Everyday we read in the paper about thousands of additional layoffs in companies all over the US, but in this case, misery particularly does not love company. The more layoffs, the more competition for jobs that are already scarce.

It has prompted us to discuss alternative income sources. What could we do to make money? That is a challenging topic and one that we will be giving a lot of attention to if Michael's job search is not quickly productive. I have also thought about attempting to work part-time despite my health problems, but I am really at loss about what I could do. The telecommunications career I left behind 17 years ago is prehistoric by today's technology standards. My skills in sales and marketing would polish up pretty quickly, but I don't have any good ideas about who would like to hire a part-time sales and marketing person whose health is fragile. I can't stay on my feet for more than 15 or 20 minutes without serious pain, so retail jobs are pretty much off the list, as well as substitute teaching. Since necessity is the mother of invention, I'm hoping that, if our situation gets really dire, I will figure something out.

Meantime, I have to get my medicare updated to include prescription drugs and perhaps a more comprehensive medical plan than traditional medicare. I am so thankful to have medicare. Michael's company offered us coverage through COBRA for a mere $900+ per month. Not happening. Doesn't it seem strange that the insurance options for people who have been laid off are so expensive that you need a job to afford it? Another similar conundrum is that uninsured people get charged the highest price for medical services when they are the ones least able to pay it. I really don't get why people object to a single-payer insurance system for this country. Obviously, the medical/insurance industries object because they might not have so much cream to skim off the top of the milk bottle, but why do ordinary people object? They obviously have never had a medical or insurance crisis to deal with.

Someone quoted scripture to me today to the effect that God chose the smallest to carry the biggest load. What was she thinking???

Ciao

The Cat Whisperer

2009-01-19T16:37:00.004-06:00

(There are pictures at the end of this entry. Don't miss them!)

We call her Mama and put food out for her everyday. Mama is a big, long-haired, gray tabby cat who has become a regular in our backyard. I suppose she had strolled through many times before we even paid attention to her. There's an old dinghy-style sailboat upside down on a boat trailer by our back fence and it would easily provide protection from the elements and from prying eyes.

What really brought Mama to my attention was something entirely unexpected. A large umbrella plant grows outside the picture window in our bathroom. It shields the lower part of the window from direct view and, since we can't put the mini blinds all the way down without crushing the potted plants on the windowsill, it helps to insure a complete visual barrier when we want privacy.

The window sits directly over our bathtub, a wide, deep contraption that I have to step into to reach the mini blinds. One morning, standing in the bathtub and casually surveying our little kingdom, I noticed the umbrella plant rustling the tiniest bit. I could not see evidence of a breeze, and so I looked closer at the plant. I like to watch the lizards and tree frogs that frequent our yard and expected to see either a large green anole or a small green tree frog hopping around the bush. Nothing seemed to be there.

Intrigued, I hunkered up to the window and craned my neck to look down towards the ground. To my utter amazement, I found myself looking into a nest of newborn kittens being watched carefully by our occasional visitor, the fluffy gray tabby cat. Mama, who had at that moment acquired her name, stared at me balefully, as if her look alone would keep me away. It wouldn't.

Aside: I love cats and I love kittens even more. My very first "only mine" pet was a kitten some farm friends from Larimore, North Dakota gave me when I was 9. The kitten really should have been left with her mom longer, but I fed her and cared for her and, eventually, she gifted me with kittens. My dad had little tolerance for cats, and the kittens were given away as soon as they were weaned. Mom went too, although I was allowed to keep one male kitten for my own. That made me happy enough - he was a kitten, after all. Unfortunately, the poor thing got distemper and died right outside my bedroom window within a few months. I never had another cat until I got my first apartment in 1969.

As I said, I could not resist taking a closer look at the litter in my umbrella plant, and I also thought Mama might need food, so I took her a dish of wet cat food and kept my distance while I watched the kittens squirm and listened to their squeaky mews. There were five of them, and I relished the thought of five playful kittens romping in my back yard. The next day, when I took more food out for Mama, they were all gone. All that Mama had left behind was a crushed spot at the base of my bush. I never saw those kittens again. And I didn't see Mama again for a long time either.

We have two small ponds in our backyard which draw many creatures in search of water. We see squirrels, opossums, birds of all kinds, water snakes once in a while, lots of frogs, toads, and lizards, and cats. Once we found a large black lab in our pond up to his shoulders, just cooling off. I still don't know how he got into our yard! When Mama appeared again, it was at the pond. And she had two weaned kittens with her. This was long after the original batch I saw under the umbrella tree and must have been a new litter.

She had brought them for water, but we made a habit of feeding strays who came through, so the three of them stayed awhile to enjoy the easy meals. Mama would always sit off to the side, letting the kittens scarf up the food until they had had their fill. Then she would come over and eat her fill. This went on for a week or two, then we noticed that the kittens weren't always there. They stayed away longer and longer and soon stopped coming altogether. Mama kept coming though. To us, she became our "outside" cat; to her, we had no use except to serve dinner.

Mama remained so wary of us that we soon concluded she was actually feral and not a pet tossed out or lost. She would wait on the patio for us to notice her and bring her food out, but as soon as we opened the door, she would retreat ten or twenty feet, then wait until we went back inside before venturing to the meal. Michael and I made it a habit to talk to her whenever we saw her in the yard, trying to acclimate her to our voices and our presence. We succeeded enough that she became a daily visitor.

When we suddenly had lots of cat visitors in a few days, we suspected that Mama was in heat again. We began to think about having her spayed, but really didn't know how to get the job done when she was so scared and cautious. Soon enough, the vistors disappeared and we resumed our normal routine.

One morning, as I made my bed, I saw Mama in the side yard stretched out on the grass. Next to her a kitten of probably 6 weeks played by itself, ambushing stalks of grass, bugs, and Mama's tail in no particular order. A "tuxedo" cat, the kitten had longish, black and white fur and looked just like a neighbors' cat. The neighbors did not particularly like cats, but their daughter had adopted this one as a little girl and was so persistent about "Black and White" being her cat, that her parents eventually let her feed him. But he wasn't an inside cat and he didn't merit veterinary visits or neutering. No surprise Mama's baby looked just like him!

Mama came by everyday for meals, but Baby had disappeared. I took to spying on Mama, trying to figure out where she might have Baby stashed so I could tame it enough to get it adopted and also take it out of the reproductive cycle that had produced it. After many weeks, Baby did start coming along with Mama for meals, although it didn't eat kibble yet. While Mama ate, we watched the kitten play delightfully on our patio. Michael remembered his laser pointer and began a regular ritual of playing chase games with Baby through the window of our back door.

At night, the laser showed up all the way across the yard and seemed to convince Baby of it prey-ness with no trouble at all. It did not take long before Baby came looking for his "friend" the red dot in the evenings. But only the red dot - Baby fled in terror if it caught even a glimpse of a human being through the window. Try as we might, we could not get Baby to stay even as near as Mama when we brought food out.

Nevertheless, we kept up our soft-talking routine and always tried to be slow and careful with our movements. Once or twice I pretended to go back inside and stayed near the food, but out of sight. Baby inadvertently gamboled within two feet of me more than once, with predictable consequences as soon as he saw me. By this time, Baby was eating kibble, too. And, as before, Mama would wait for Baby to eat his fill before stepping up to the dish for her own meal.

The weather got cold and I began to worry about their protection, so I put a a large plastic bucket on its side, covered two-thirds of the opening with plastic sheeting, filled with large pieces of Michael's old, cut-up terry cloth robe, and began feeding them in the open part of the bucket. While Mama eschewed the offered bed, I did see Baby in there more than once on cold December days.

Which brings us practically current. Around Christmas time, Mama disappeared for several days. Baby came for food and to look for Mama. Its plaintive mewing really got to me and I began wracking my brain for ways to nab Baby while Mama was gone. On December 26th, I sat on the floor, hidden behind my back door, which I opened just enough to poke a toy on a stick through. I figured that after our many evenings of red-dot games, Baby would not be afraid of a toy.

It seems I was right. For an hour or so, I played with Baby from behind the door, offering the occasional treat and, when it seemed to like that, put a bit of canned cat food on the door sill. Cautious at first, Baby soon became curious enough to stick its head into our house. As soon as it saw me, of course, Baby hightailed back outside, but I deemed the adventure as success and planned to do it again the next evening.

December 27th brought us some of our coldest weather of the season. We had guests to celebrate Michael's birthday (the next day), so I didn't have a lot of time to think about Baby, but after our friends left, I resumed my position behind the back door, albeit somewhat colder that night than the previous! I played with Baby and fed Baby for about an hour before it walked right into our house! I scooped it up and began my taming campaign on the spot.

Baby seemed more lonely than scared after I actually had it in my arms. The kitten hunkered down against my breast while I wrapped my sweater around him. For a long time, I simply held Baby and spoke quietly and calmly. By then, it was close to midnight, and we realized we needed a safe place to put Baby for the night. (I felt fairly certain our two 14 year-old cats would not welcome a kitten from the backyard with any kind of warmth and I did not want to risk spreading fleas, worms, or diseases Baby might have to our totally indoor cats!)

Since our guest bathroom had a sliding door shower enclosure, we put Baby up there, bringing in the bathrobe rags from the bucket-house and even warming them up in the dryer for Baby's comfort. In went food, water, and a makeshift litter box. I also found some toys to keep Baby occupied in our absence. Baby has been inside ever since.

"It" turned out to be "he" and "Baby" became "Smudge" because of the black spot on his pink nose that seemed like it should wipe off but wouldn't. I spent every possible moment snuggling Smudge and found, to my delight, that this scaredy-cat did not seemed scared of me. He slept in my arms and sometimes crawled into the sleeves of my over sized sweat-shirt shrug.

By New Year's Eve, my talk of taming Smudge so he could be adopted had become a family joke. We decided we should have him checked out by our vet so we could introduce him to Jack and Trixie, who were more than concerned about this THING in THEIR house. The vet let us know why Smudge had been so compliant and willing to lay sleeping in my arms so much - he had a respiratory infection and was running a fever. (Although he did not have fleas or worms, which made me happy.)

The vet suggested that he might be more active when he felt better. That certainly proved to be true! Smudge and I will have our one-month anniversary in a few days. He is a ball of fire now that he feels good, and he is a joy to play with and to cuddle. Jack and Trixie still don't like him, although Jack has decided that he might like to play a little after all and I foresee tolerance, if not friendship, around the corner. Smudge graduated from the bathroom unless supervised after he had his course of antibiotics.

To give him a leg up against the big cats, I put up a kitty skyscraper that had been in storage for a while because neither Jack nor Trixie would deign to climb on it. Smudge loves his tower. The big cats can't get his food or his toys or him. He is adept at flinging himself from our bed onto the skyscraper and sticking, a very handy skill when all four pounds of you has just pounced on a sleeping, eighteen-pound cat's tail!

Best of all, Smudge has adopted me as his new mom. He purrs like a turbo-charged car whenever I pick him up. He likes to snuggle up on my lap. He really likes to play games with me. And, amazingly to me, he loves my computer. Smudge sits on my lap and watches the cursor (or whatever else is moving) intently. Sometimes he tries to catch it, but mostly, Smudge contents himself with close observation of the monitor. When he gets bored, he sleeps on my lap. When he gets restless, he tries to eat my hands while I try to type. We are working things out pretty well. Here are some photos of Smudge in my lap. Until Michael showed up with the camera, Smudge had alternated between raptly watching the monitor and blissing out while I scratched his throat. The camera proved too diverting, though, and drew his attention away. If you don't think Smudge is the cutest cat ever, there is something wrong with you!!

Notice the little black spot on Smudge's nose. Don't you just want to get a towel and wipe it off?

BTW, we haven't forgotten Mama. She came back three or four days after leaving Smudge to his own devises. Obviously, she thought it was time for him to move along so she could start housekeeping with that black and white tomcat again. We plan to get a live trap this coming week and take her in for neutering, then return her to our back yard to live. We are happy to have Mama as a feral friend, but I can't take in any more kittens.

Ciao!

How I Almost Missed Christmas Making a T-Shirt Quilt & Marblized Quilting Fabric

2009-01-18T18:25:00.009-06:00

2009 already. Wow! How did that happen?

The 2008 holiday season kept me busy every single minute right up to - and past - Christmas. Friends tell me that my feeling of being squeezed between Thanksgiving and Christmas happened because Thanksgiving was so late. Perhaps. My father's birthday also fell on Thanksgiving this year, so between November 27th and January 2, my family celebrated three birthdays, an anniversary, and three major holidays. That will put pressure on anyone.

More than that, I made two significant Christmas gifts this year: a tee-shirt quilt for my youngest daughter and hand-marbleized quilting fabric for my mother.

Disclaimer: I marbleized the fabric, I did not make the fabric.

I constructed Victoria's quilt from tee-shirts of hers that go all the way back to kindergarten. Since she is now a senior in high school, that is q long time and a lot of tees. I made the process up as I went along, with coaching from my sister-in-law Judi that helped me avoid some big mistakes. Working with tee-shirts presents unique problems. They are knit and soft and slippery, especially old, well-worn tees, and you cannot really cut them uniformly, a must in quilting. So the cutting step got extended. First I reduced the tee-shirts to separate fronts and backs with no sleeves, collars, or seams. Next, I ironed fusible interfacing onto each piece. Then I recut all the pieces to square, so they would sew up together properly.

The next step in creating a quilt is to sew the pieces together to create your quilt top. I alternated fronts and backs, mixing them up so that the colors varied as much as possible. Apparently, most message and organizational tee-shirts are white, black, or gray, so I worked with a fairly limited palette. For the back of the quilt, I used a nice piece of cream colored cotton with tiny treble clefs and musical notes printed densely on it. (Victoria is a talented musician, playing the flute, piano, and singing.)

The top and bottom of the quilt sandwich around batting, the stuff that makes a quilt warm and soft. I do not care for the basting or pinning that one must do to hold a quilt together for finishing, so I tried something new this time - a fusible batting. It turned out to be fine, but I inadvertently purchased crib-sized batting, so I had to piece two of them together in order to make Victoria's quilt. Then I had to crawl around on my tile floor, ironing and steaming the entire quilt to fuse it together. A tedious process at best, but I did it.

I had decided to machine stitch this quilt because I could not possible hand quilt it in time for Christmas 2008, but I had never machine quilted before and I had a brand new sewing machine that I wasn't practiced with. Hmmm ... could this point to trouble ahead? Well yes, but I won't bore you except to say that an entire three-layer quilt is a LOT of fabric to squeeze through the small opening under the arm of a standard-sized sewing machine. Imagine my reaction as I came to the end of my diagonal, red thread quilting and discovered that I put one of the tee-shirt rectangles in inside out! Picking out stitching, taking apart seams, turning the fabric, resewing it into a (heretofore) finished quilt and replacing all the stitching provoked a highly colorful, nearly continuous, stream of bad language from my kitchen. (I had to relocate my sewing machine cabinet to the kitchen so I could use my kitchen table to hold the quilt while I machine quilted.)

All-in-all, making this quilt is not a task I am eager to reprise, although given some time, I might relent. The finished product turned out better than I deserved it to based on my skills. And Victoria loved it, which count more than anything.

Here are a few photos of the finished quilt.

My next project for Christmas - marbleizing fabric for my mother, a creative, prolific, and talented quilter who has made over a hundred quilts in the last 20 years. I only recently learned how to marbleize anything, and this would be my first solo endeavor. My materials were quite old and not as sophisticated as the materials that my teacher provided, but I did my best.

Aside: I took the class from Galen Berry, a fabulously talented artist from Oklahoma, at the Museum of Printing History in Houston, a unique venue that anyone who can visit should visit.

The main deficiency, if it is one, of my marbled fabric is that the designs are quite light and not the visit hues that Galen's paint produced. But everything doesn't have to be vivid, so I made my mother 9 subtle, color-coordinated fat eighths (a quilting term meaning an eighth of a yard plus a bit - thus the "fat" part of the name.) I made each one increasingly darker, to give her the opportunity to create interest with her piecing. She really liked them, which delights me. When I get new paints, I'll make her a set of vivid fat eighths to make another quilt with ... because Mother is undoubtedly going to make another quilt as soon as this one is done!

Take a look at the fat eighths I marbleized for her:

I feel good about these two accomplishments, although the time I spent making them kept me from doing other things, like blogging. I intend to catch up, but not all in one sitting, so watch for me to return with more tales of my holiday season.

Ciao!

Why Obama's Election Makes Me Jubilant PLUS a Moving Commentary by an Unknown British Woman

2008-11-05T14:39:00.006-06:00

I found this commentary online following an article that reported international reaction to the election on the CBS website. It really touched me. Whether you supported Obama or not, I think it will touch you as an American. As an Obama supporter, I am jubilant and optimistic. I hope that the disappointed McCain supporters among you will come to believe that this was right choice, at the right time.

I have raised (almost - Tori is only 17) two biracial children. I married Alix's father, a black man, in 1973. The world was so different then that many people in my own family refused to attend the wedding or even acknowledge it. Thankfully, my family long ago found the heart to accept my three children, black and white, birthed and adopted, but many incidents throughout the years have reminded our family that racism, especially institutional racism, remained part of the American scene.

Obama's victory in this election gives me hope that the spector of racism is diminishing quickly enough that my future grandchildren will not suffer from it. May it be so. (No more racism AND grandchildren someday!!)

Lane

From a comment board in The Guardian Newspaper (UK)
Posted by SubstanceD on the CBS website 11-5-08

Sometimes I wish I was an American, in those moments where they seem to stand apart from us. Their endless optimism, their endless desire for change, and movement, and history. They make history, where, as an English woman, I feel I am just you know in it. I sat up and watched Obama become the 44th American President, I watched Americans cry and I cried and I believed in him and his words and the fact that really this is going to have an impact on us all, and to say that we are not involved is really fruitless.

Sometimes I wish I was an American just so I could be proud and wave a flag and not feel like a loser. I wish that I could hold my flag and say you know what, I want my country to be amazing and believe we are, in many more ways that you will never ever understand; and, most of all, I am proud to be English, I am proud to be British.

But I cannot, not just yet, but maybe one day we will chant, Yes we can! and I will teach my children to believe that they can do anything and be anything; and , more over, that we are all safe tonight. And we will live to a dream that those Yanks make seem a little less fluffy and at times like these very real.

Obama, not as an American but as a Human, has given me my Human flag, and for this moment, we live in hope.

Thank you America, and I wish us all a happy and optimistic future!

Thoughts on Hurricane Ike

2008-09-18T16:45:00.004-05:00

Hurricanes. When we moved to the Texas Gulf Coast 19 years ago, I gave only passing thought to hurricanes. I grew up in tornado country and vividly remember riding with my family to Fargo, North Dakota to look at the aftermath of a big tornado there as a little girl. Two of the sights that awed me that day included a ladies slip streaming in the wind from a tree branch high above the ground and a house opened like a child's toy with the tub and commode gleaming whitely in the after-storm sunshine. After my eighteen years in North Dakota, I spent many more years in Missouri and Kansas, states also very susceptible to unpredictable and dangerous weather.

My next residence, California, did not have tornadoes, but it did have earthquakes, which, like tornadoes, are only marginally predictable. Our first California earthquake scared the beejesus out of me and resulted in two funny (now) family stories. In the first bit of humor, I leaped out of bed and rousted Alix and Lupe (our foster daughter) planting them in the doorway of their bedroom. This is the correct thing to do, but planting them in their doorway meant that they were staring straight across the hallway at Michael who, because he slept nude, was therefore trapped in bed and unable to protect himself from the earthquake!

Leaving Michael, Alix, and Lupe in their awkward triangle, I rushed into Nick's room. Nick was about 6 at the time and sleeping in the upper level of his bunk bed. I snatched him from his covers without a word and stuck him in the doorway of his room before he even had time to wake up. Later, Nick said to me, "Mom, next time we have an earthquake, do you think you could say 'Excuse me, Nick, there's an earthquake.' before you grab me out of bed?"

When we then moved to Houston and people mentioned the possibility of hurricanes, I blithely said, "Well, at least we'll know they are coming."

Turns out that isn't so much help.

When it became apparent that Houston would be involved in Ike to some degree or another, Michael and I made our plans. We had evacuated for Hurricane Rita, joining the maddeningly slow exodus of millions of people, most of whom - like us - should have stayed home. Although we had an enjoyable visit with my brother and sister-in-law in Omaha, getting there and getting home was beyond awful. Why did we evacuate? Because our elected officials told us to. They forgot to mention the now-familiar mantra: Run from water, hide from wind. Why did we run to Omaha? Because when Nick and Julia left New Orleans fleeing Katrina just days before, they planned to be gone 5 days and they didn't get back for 6 months. They lost almost everything. We figured if we were going to be homeless, we should go to a place where we could stay a while without spending our entire retirement fund.

So we fled Rita and swore thereafter that we would not evacuate ever again. We had to prepare to weather Hurricane Ike.

Aside: Isn't it interesting that we use the word 'weather' to indicate coping with the effects of "weather'?

I dutifully acquired enough canned food to last us for ten days. I filled two bath tubs with water for hygiene and etc. I also filled two ten-gallon collapsible containers with drinking water. We moved breakables to safe locations away from windows. Michael taped up the picture window in our bathroom, the only one we felt really worried about because our other windows are mullioned. Michael, with some help from me, cleared everything from our front and back yards that could possibly fly around and hurt someone. We planned to take down and wrap our artwork in plastic, but by the time we got to that, I was too exhausted to care.

A safe spot for us posed a big problem. Our house has no interior rooms unless you count the foyer coat closet and it would not accommodate one of us for very long! We decided to use the bedroom hallway which is enclosed for about six feet and turns out to be the exact width of a twin bed mattress. Victoria's mattress would work, so, on Friday afternoon, we put clean sheets on it and positioned near the hallway for later use.

The coming storm and its television coverage seemed to hypnotize us and we kept watching the reports over and over again while we waited patiently for it to arrive in our area. Ike moved slowly and we live on the northwest edge of Houston, in an unincorporated area of Harris County. From Galveston to our house is one hundred miles and our wait for the storm seemed to last forever.

We did not turn in until 1:00 in the morning. The hallway felt stuffy, so Michael plugged a fan in and pointed the welcome coolness at our pallet. Our cats, Jack and Trixie, seemed baffled by our decision to sleep on the floor. We had moved their litter box into our bathroom from its usual hallway location, for our nose comfort and also to keep them from walking back and forth on top of us during the night. Unfortunately, neither of them stayed put in our bedroom as we had hoped. (To be able to corral them more easily if a disaster occurred.)

By 1:30 a.m. we had snuggled into our cozy bed. Our very cozy bed. Our cozier cozy bed than any we had ever shared in thirty-two years of marriage. Michael and I are not as thin and svelte as we once were. (I have pictures to prove that we were once svelte!) Laying flat, we touched each the hallway walls one side and each other in the middle. Turning onto our sides scarcely helped matters but we soldiered on. At about 2:00 a.m., our power went out. Now fan-less and A/C-less, we added sweltering to cramped. After a horribly miserable hour of dosing and waking, we abandoned safety for comfort.

Our headboard sits directly in front of two large, side-by-side windows. We closed the mini-blinds, piled pillows between the headboard and the blinds, crawled in and stretched out. Compared to the floor of a three-foot wide hallway, it was the Waldorf Astoria.

During this period, the wind rose and the rain pelted our roof harder and harder. We slept in snatches, an hour here, twenty minutes there, rousing and checking out the storm as the noise came and went. Amazingly, the night sky stayed so bright that we could see the storm's action clearly. I had heard how dark it became in Galveston when the storm hit and didn't expect this, but perhaps by the time Ike reached Cypress, the nearly-full moon had risen and was reflecting off the cloud cover.

We never heard the "freight train" sound, but I sat on the bench in the office and watched my neighbors forty-foot tall pine tree wave back and forth like a sparkler in a kid's hand. I watched the rain 'fall' horizontally. Standing by my front door, I felt the pull and push of wind moving the metal door in and out of its frame with odd little sucking sounds occurring at each pull. Our front door has a small entry area that is brick on three sides and open to the yard. Leaves plastered the window on the front door and pine needles danced on our welcome mat.

We worried about our pergola and Michael had tied clothesline rope through the lattice work top in 15 or 20 places to - hopefully - keep it in place. We expected to lose the vines that grew up the supporting beams and across the top. During the height of the storm, we watched out the backdoor window and saw that the clothesline rope hardly moved despite the wind's fury. Apparently, Michael and I built a sturdier structure than we even knew when we put the pergola up two years ago. The vines suffered some, especially the night-blooming and star jasmines which were on the exposed side of the patio, but all-in-all, the plants held up well.
We even had flowers blooming on our bougainvillea within a few days!

During the eye of the storm, when the wind dies down, we ventured out. By this time it was daylight. We pulled on ponchos and opened the front door. We had pulled our cars onto our front terrace the day before, thinking that in front of the house, they would be protected from falling trees, while in the driveway they would be exposed on three sides to danger. They blocked us in a bit, but we crawled through a gap and onto the driveway for our first good look at what had transpired in the first half of the storm.

Walking up and down our block, greeting others who had the same idea, we saw a lot of destruction. Fences were gone; big trees were uprooted, leaving peculiar looking hillocks where front yards had been. Many, many branches littered yards and streets and we saw a few roofs stripped down to bare wood and many others missing shingles. Our neighborhood has lots of pine trees and the usual mat of orange pine needles had been accented with lots of green needles. All the trees looked like fall had suddenly transpired: branches were nearly bare. In our case, we lost shingles in six or eight places,had a water leak inside the house, lost one large tree limb in the back yard (that landed safely in an open area!), had lots of small branches down, and the gardens were flattened. (The elephant ears took a real beating, probably the worst of all the plants. They remain flattened even now, so I suppose we'll have to wait for a crop to grow in.) We lost power for three days and cable, Internet, and phone for nearly ten days.

Pretty soon the wind picked up and we fled to the shelter of our house. Without power, it would eventually get uncomfortable, but while the storm made its way through our area, it stayed pretty cool. Saturday afternoon, the sun came out and so did our neighborhood. Everyone was cleaning up - raking debris into piles, propping up fences where they could, cutting up trees and tree limbs.

By Sunday afternoon, the wild disarray of the storm had disappeared, leaving remnants that I expect will be with us for quite a while. Fences are torn apart and piled on front berms along with other types of debris, like the old tire someone deposited on our berm when we weren't looking. Roofs sport blue tarps. Windows are boarded up. People aren't supposed to repair things anymore than absolutely necessary so the insurance adjuster's can see the damage and once seen, probably won't get repairs done until they get checks in hand, so I suppose the tattered look will be around for a while.

Texas insurance policies changed after Hurricane Rita and now insurance deductibles for "tropical cyclones"
are twice as high as the deductibles for any other type of damage. That means many people will not get covered, including - most likely - us. Michael had hoped for a new roof, but the adjuster who finally came by yesterday, says it will be "just repairs" for the roof and the foyer ceiling. With a deductible close to $4,000, we will most likely be paying for this out of our own pocket despite having insurance. That said, I wouldn't trade places with any of the poor souls who had more severe, even catastrophic, damage. We were lucky to be spared serious loss or injury.

Now that I have added hurricanes/tropical cyclones to my list of weathered weather, I can truly say I will be happy to go another nineteen years without seeing my next one!

I had a lot of difficulty getting this blog written. Although the date says 9-18 (when I actually started it), I found I did not want to keep working on it. In the weeks since the storm, I have felt terribly fatigued and down. The aftermath of the storm includes an emotional let down - from being ramped up on adrenaline? - and physical exhaustion. Many of my friends report these same feelings. I probably won't write any more about Hurricane Ike now that I've gotten it out of my system. I'd like to have a happier topic next time!!

Middle-of-the-Night Randomness and Naughty Sock Monkeys

2008-09-05T04:30:00.001-05:00

Once again, I cannot sleep. Insomnia is a plague for me. On the nights that I go to sleep and stay asleep, I feel so blessed. This night, I went to bed at 10:55 pm, turned off the lights at 11:18 pm, awakened at 12:55 am (due to various acrobatics involving my husband and our very large cat Jack). After an obligatory potty stop and drink of water, I slipped back into bed and tried every go-to-sleep trick I know. At 2:01 am I gave up and got up. When this happens, I usually get back to bed about 5 or 6 am. This particular morning, I have to be ready to leave the house at 6:45 am. Not a very promising start to my day.

There is this wonderful moment at bedtime when one reclines against her pillow and drifts away into the void. Or, there is this terrible moment when one is teetering on the edge of the void and suddenly her brain kicks in and says, "Whoa, look at that, you're about to fall asleep. Way cool. I don't wanna. Let's play."

My Let's Play brain is inventive and creative. Some of my best work originated in the middle of the night. So I got this idea that if I actualized my creativity during waking hours, I would be able to sleep at night. The entire plan for creating my recent "Naughty Monkeys Peep Show" altered book came in the dark of night. I got up and wrote out a 13-point plan of action that translated into some remarkable art.

Let's talk art. I love to construct things. Always have. I am an architect in my soul and could have been an architect in real life if I had been born a little later than 1950. Math and science were verboten for us females. I found myself steered firmly into feminine jobs, graduating from Webster College with a degree in English lit and a teaching certificate for grades 1 - 12 in Missouri. Fortunately, I stumbled on to an exciting graduate program at Washington University in St. Louis called Technology and Human Affairs. This now-defunct program (it lives on as Engineering and Public Policy, but I wouldn't be able to get into it anymore with my liberal arts degree and paltry science and math background) excited me tremendously and gave me the tools that resulted, after two intermediate jobs, in my career in telecommunications.

While at Wash U. I discovered architecture. More to the point, I discovered a fabulous book titled "The Universal Traveler" by Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall among the School of Architecture textbooks. "TUT" is subtitled: "a soft-systems guide to creativity, problem-solving, and the process of reaching goals." I bought it then, lost it along the way, and got a new volume from Michael for Christmas last year. Thank you, Michael!!

Anyway, that got my attention, but I was too far gone down my educational path (in graduate school and already making up for missing bits of undergraduate education, like taking graduate Economics - two semesters of undergraduate economics in a single semester) to pick up the requirements I would need for architecture. But I bought books on home design and building your own home and anything else that caught my eye about how buildings are constructed and how they turn out. I have a tidy little collection and would happily show them off or recommend them if anyone is interested.

That's the long way around to my point - sorry! I love to construct things. I can figure out what's wrong with stuff by looking at it and reverse engineering it. Sometimes Michael gets frustrated when he has struggled with a repair, let's say, and then I come along, study it for five or ten minutes, and then say something like, "Oh, see this widget over here? I think if you moved it over there, the whatsit will go back in its track and work again." And it does.

So, WIVLA announced its annual print show at the Museum of Printing History in Houston. Theme? Unabridged Edition. What the hell does that mean? I really struggled with the theme because it just didn't translate into artwork for me. When I asked others about it, the general response was that the theme didn't matter for this show (it is a great WIVLA tradition that even beginners are usually welcomed into) and I should just do whatever I wanted. Something printed, of course, and preferably something embellished or altered after printing.

Still, I struggled for meaning. Unabridged Edition. GGGAAHH!!!!

Until on insomniac night when it all came to me and I developed my construction blueprint for my Naughty Monkeys. I would alter a book - the edition - making it into an old-fashioned peep show and I would put a titillating photograph inside - the unabridged part. Ah, but it is for the MPH and sometimes they have children tour, and there have been issues about "fleshy" photos in the past. Besides, who would I take a titillating picture of? I couldn't see my friends or family signing up to be featured in a peep show.

But I have a lovely sock monkey couple, beautifully dressed, thus beautifully available for UNdress, and, as far as I can tell, sock monkey sex doesn't count as pornography!! I did do research on the subject. There are an amazing number of sock monkey websites (who knew??) but any naked sock monkeys I saw (and I saw a lot of them) were innocents.

Oh, I should mention YouTube. There is sock monkey porn on YouTube, but it is of the most puerile and unimaginative sort. Themactically, they involved drunk (or silly) teen-agers, sock monkeys, and sock monkey tails waved around between sock monkey's legs. Nothing like my high-class peep show.

I also researched peep shows, discovering that the shows from the olden days, like the 1904 World's Fair, were much more elegant and well-appointed than modern peep shows. Many photographs of peep show booths and peep show pictures are available for the canny researcher. Apparently stereoptic shows (where you get a 3-D effect) were popular when live women were unavailable.

I devised a construction plan for cutting a door into the front cover of my book, removing the center of about half the pages to create the space for my "show," "papering" the front and back cover with torn tissue pieces (small and a pain to work with, but I didn't know that until too late), hinging the door and putting a doorknob on it ... well, a 13-point plan to create my peep show. I also had to stage and photograph the actual sock monkey pornography.

I felt pretty creepy making them do "stuff," but they didn't object and it was for art's sake. Although there is a fine point to be made about whether sock monkeys can technically be pornographic since they are toys and they don't have the requisite parts for anything sexual. Well, that's a discussion for another day.

Some insomniac nights have better outcomes than others. Tonight I am writing this blog, so you will have to judge how good the outcome was.

I did create the "Naughty Monkey Peep Show" complete with an attached collection box for quarters. (Based on my research, 25 cents a peep is about right for the olden days). My dremel came in very handy for several parts of this art project. I love my dremel. The first attempt failed because I had problems drilling some holes that I later decided were unnecessary. But book two turned out beautifully.

Sad to say, the curator of the MPH, Amanda Stevenson, rejected the piece for the WIVLA show. Although, she told me in an email that she liked it, she also said it didn't fit in the show because it was "architectural and interactive." Being bumped from the show just about broke my heart, but I LOVED the architectural and interactive part. Yes, I am an architect, if only of my own small constructions. But I love them and they work, and people can do things with them - interact by opening the door and peeping at the sock monkeys inflagrante delicato.

I'd like to show you pictures, but that would involved going to another computer and turning it on, and , hey, its 4:11 am and I don't feel like it. But I will put photographs up soon. I have also decided to make some more naughty monkey shows, so stay tuned. At the moment, I don't have the right books to desecrate. I need hardbacks around 6x9 or 6x10 and at least an inch thick. They will not be returned and they will be cut up, so the books have to be junk. I used an old alumni directory for the original peep show. If you have books and live in the area (or want to mail them to me) let me know and something can be arranged!!

Now I am going to spell check, publish, and go back to bed, "to sleep, perchance to dream ...." as the Bard famously said. Or in my case, perchance to sleep!!

Look for future posts on such troubling topics as the raging pit bull in lipstick (her words, not mine) who happens to be running for Vice President on the Republican ticket.

Ciao.

July 1st Miscel-lanie

2008-07-01T22:33:00.003-05:00

A new month, it must be time for a blog entry. I think about entries quite often, but usually in the middle of the night when I can't sleep but don't want to get out of bed. When I do write an entry, I just can't remember all the great ideas I had at 2:00 am. Such is life ...

A few notes come to mind. One of my older brothers had two strokes recently. He is 61, a year older than my husband and he owns/drives a big rig. He happened to be on the road, but not driving, when it happened and fortunately, he is doing well now. His speech is impaired a bit and he has hired someone else to drive his truck while he rides shotgun, but overall, he seems okay. But I am not prepared for my parents, in their late eighties, to have strokes, let alone my siblings. We are all getting older, a fact that I know intellectually, but my inner child refuses to grow up and I don't feel like I'm as old as I truly am. Now, I hear some people making snide comments about my age, but I always thought 58 years old was a lot older than I am now that I am a month short of 58. I don't feel old, but Tim Russert died last month at 58 of a heart attack. My brother had two strokes. While I don't feel so old, I do feel vulnerable.

New topic. Tori seems to be settling in to her new environment. I am driving up to get her and bring her home for the 4th of July weekend on Thursday and we will see then how well she really is doing. But she has changed her nickname from Tori to Vicky. When I call and ask for Victoria, the girls yell out "Vicky." It sounds very strange to my ear. The summer I turned 16, I had the good fortune to attend a summer school program at the Mt. Herman and Northfield Schools in Massachusetts. Over that summer, I turned 16, had my first seriously returned infatuation, and changed my name from Mary Lane to Lane. I doubt that my mother had the same difficulty with the change that I am experiencing because she never called me Mary Lane until I went to Catholic school in the second grade. Up until then, I had been Lanie or Lane, but Sr. Theodosia, my second grade teacher, refused to call me Lane because it was not a saint's name. I refused to answer to Mary - honestly, I didn't recognize the name as belonging to me - and eventually my mother convinced the teacher to call me Mary Lane. Oh, how I hated that name, especially the way it slumped into one word that sounded like a drunk talking ... Marahlane ... Anyway, my mother told me often that she regretted including the Mary part of my name first and wished she had named me Lane Marie instead. So I believe she found it easy to switch back to Lane. Vicky is a little harder for me. It is a family name in both Michael's family and mine (a niece and a cousin respectively), but it has never been Tori's name. Oh, well. I will have to change with the times - eventually. I'm not ready yet.

My friends Marilyn and Ken had a meet and greet for Larry Joe Douherty, our Democratic candidate for Congress, at their home on Sunday. I enjoyed meeting Mr. Douherty. He is quite polished - not the country-bumpkin his Texan name and twang might suggest. This was my very first meet and greet and I must say it tickled me to be able to ask direct questions of the candidate and hear the answers up close and personal. Our congressional district is gerrymandered beyond belief, one of the abominations created by Tom Delay et al when they stole Texas Democratic seats a few years ago. (How the mighty have fallen. I hope Tom Delay gets every single thing he deserves. None of it will be pleasant.) My son used to live in Austin, Texas, 160 miles from Houston. He lived in the same congressional district as Michael and I because of the gerrymandering. Austin was too liberal, so the Republican stretched the district sideways all the way to Harris County (Houston area) to pull in the ultra-conservative, religious right voters we have to live with here. The Delay thugs got away with murder, but the tables are turning now and we have Shrub to thank for a lot of it. Life is funny when you least expect it!

I have much more on my plate, but it is 11:02 PM and I am trying to get to bed at a reasonable time these days, so I must sign off.

Ciao.

The Artist's Way and Robbery on the Electric Highway

2008-06-23T20:42:00.005-05:00

Have you heard of The Artist's Way (TAW) by Julia Cameron? It is a program for encouraging one's creativity and artistic growth. I first became aware of TAW in 1996, when an acquaintance invited me to be a part of a group of other artists, all strangers to me, following the program. Five of us signed up for the 12-week adventure and two of those five are close friends of mine to this day. In fact, the three of us, plus three additional people, have recently started another TAW group and are re-exploring our creativity.

The first time I did the program, it sent me off into a glorious whirlwind of unexpected creativity. I hope the same thing happens this time. Each week, we read a chapter and complete tasks associated with them; each day we write three morning pages (MP), journal entries where we just dump all of our gripes, miseries, etc. so that we can get on with our day unimpeded. Once a week, we are each supposed to take our artist-self on a date.

I find it difficult to think of artist dates for myself. Last week, I made cotton candy with my very own cotton candy machine. I loved it. Michael and the kids gave me the cotton candy machine many years ago as a gift and I haven't used it in a while, so spending an evening making and eating the fluffy, sugary stuff tickled me pink. I have recently seen special sugar advertised for cotton candy "floss" and wonder if it is much different from fine granulated sugar. (Besides costing more, that is.) I use extra fine sugar and I dye it with a little food coloring so that it is colorful.

If anyone knows about cotton candy floss sugar, please let me know.

This week, TAW instructs us to engage in reading deprivation all week. Yes, you heard me: know reading for a week. I can hardly bear it. The concept is that if an artist is NOT reading, said artist can show up and do something more creative. Actually, Cameron has a point. I can get so caught up reading that I neglect not only my creative pursuits, but also the basic necessities of life. (Imagine me in my bathrobe, lounging in bed, a half-eaten sleeve of saltine crackers and an empty glass of water in the vicinity. It is NOT a pretty picture.)

Meanwhile, the house is uncannily quiet.Tori has been gone for one week. Everything is tidy, quiet, and predictable around here. I thought it would be terrible, but I quite like it, at least after a week. We have had several phone conversations with her and she is starting to adjust. They are teaching her how to drive - that started today - so I am sure she will be happy (for a while anyway).

It is nice to have a sedate entry after several riled up one. Reminds me of that curse: "May you live in interesting times." My times are not so interesting at all at the moment.

Oh, except for my electric bill. I forgot tell mention that item. It did rile me up plenty. You know, we had a hot May and so far, it has been a hot June. Not much rain, lots of lawn and garden watering required. So I didn't flinch too badly when I opened my usual $35 water bill today and found it was $52.17. (And the day I forgot to turn the water off for several hours could have played into the total.) But the next bill I opened, my electric bill from Dynowatt, almost caused me to have a stroke. Instead of something around $150, what I expected, it was $496.02!!!!! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I kid you not. My cost per kilowatt hour skyrocketed from 16 cents to twenty-five and a half cents.

When I finally got through - no doubt their phone lines were burning up today - the pleasant young man explained that their cost per megawatt hour had gone up from $100 to $4,000 THIS MONTH. Oh, he did mention that he would be glad to put me on contract and lower my rates ... (It is odd, don't you think, that if I sign a contract their cost is lower than if I don't?) I decided to check out the official Texas electric company choice web site and discovered that , despite the humongous rate increase Dynowatt claimed, everyone else seemed to have lower prices. I eventually went back to Reliant for almost one-half of Dynowatt's rate. Yes, I signed a contract, but at least I didn't feel shanghaied into it.

I recommend checking now to see what your charges for the next bill will be based on. Surely some other electric company is going to have a big rate increase, too.

Keep cool - but not too cool!

Ciao!

Don't Worry, Be Happy

2008-06-06T15:26:00.002-05:00

My natural cheerfulness reasserts itself!! The sunny summer days do not allow for feeling miserable and besides, I solved part of my problem with the Fanged Frog (FF). Tori kept expressing her need to ask questions of the FF, to discover information about her infancy, so I pulled out her baby book (which I had been saving for the right moment and kind of forgot about), sat down with her at the kitchen table, fetched the tissues she requested, and comforted her as she read through it, looked at the pages and the pictures, and asked me questions.

The baby book apparently met her immediate needs regarding the FF. I wish I had thought of it sooner, but perhaps had she seen it before she felt this emotional crisis, it would not have had the impact, or given the comfort, that it has. We are talking about other ways to capture her early childhood - a digital photo album perhaps. I do have more pictures from the early years that I haven't shown her and they will be great for the next crisis.

The FF had some pictures of Tori on her My Space that she stole from Tori's My Space or got from her own mother (or mother's house after Marilyn died in December). I have gotten My Space central to agree to remove them based on copyright violation, so hopefully that will happen soon.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I have started participating in an Artist's Way process group for 12 weeks with some wonderful long-term friends - Lynn and Carol - and some new friends - Jan and Luisa. We meet at a Denny's from 10:30 to noon once a week, then eat together. Just two sessions already have me thinking more positively about my creative work. And Michael is working with us. Although he can't come to the meetings, he did join us for lunch today.

Beyond that, I am in quite a state of flux and anticipation. Any moment, Tori's new school (where she will board starting in a few weeks) should be giving us a start date for her, which means I can't make any reliable plans for myself. I am also spending a lot of time shopping for clothes with her. (The school has a list of required clothing.) Do you know how hard it is to find chinos for a teen-aged girl in June in Houston? We have been attacking this shopping list for two months and still have only three of the required five pair of chinos. I also must provide a fall jacket and winter coat. Let us hope those items can be added in the fall because they aren't around anywhere except thrift stores right now.

What will it be like for me without Tori at home? Hard in many ways. Tori and I have spent so much time together after school and summers in the last 14 years that I can't imagine my home without her. It will be very quiet, I can tell you that. I will miss her noise.

Tori plays the flute and the piano. She sings. She plays music too loudly. She talks on the telephone, plays music, and talks to me all at the same time. She bangs every door or cupboard she touches. She knocks things over. Tori is a bundle of auditory overload. How quiet my home will be without her. It makes me almost sorry for yelling at her to turn the music down!! Almost sorry ...

She is a hugger and I will miss those hugs. She is a weeper and I will miss comforting her. She is a laugher and I will miss her belly laughs. She is exuberant and my life will be flat without her.

Waiting for the letter or phone call about school is hard. I have had a constant knot in my stomach lately. I tell myself that this is for her own good - and it truly is - but it seems hard to remember in June the pyrotechnical events of last January that started us down this road to boarding school. It tempts me to just say things have settled down and she can stay home, but I know that would be a mistake for her and for us. So I prepare as best I can for the quiet days ahead by anticipating the creative work I can accomplish in those empty hours.

Despite my anxiety about Tori's departure, I do feel cheerful; I just can't help myself.

Ciao.

The Fanged Frog Returns

2008-05-28T05:45:00.004-05:00

The week after our return from Nick's graduation should have been lovely, but it has brought us more worries. Sunday a week ago, the very day we returned from our wonderful trip to New Orleans, Victoria found her birth mother (Rana) on My Space. This was not an accident, as Rana explained to Victoria in a subsequent email. She created her My Space in the hopes that Tori would find it and, since she had it listed on Tori's aunt Stacy's My Space, it seems inevitable that the connection would be made.

I guess some explanation is necessary for this to make sense. Our adoption of Tori was totally open because we actually knew her and Rana before the idea of adoption ever came into being. We got caught up trying to help Rana, a person who at the time could not benefit from a helping hand. She proved to be a disaster for us, stealing from us and wreaking emotional havoc on our family. She left two-year-old Tori at our house while she tried to find a place to live and a job, but after Rana hit Tori with a belt buckle across the shoulder during a weekend visit, leaving a terrible bruise, CPS decided to take Tori into protective custody. That started the series of events that lead to our adoption of Tori when she was four years old.

We tried to allow contact with Rana at first, but it did not work out because Tori was terrified of her. We did keep Tori in regular touch with her grandmother, aunt, and other extended family members, even though this created a lot of emotional turmoil for everyone involved. (Keeping Victoria in contact with her family was a promise I had made to Rana, and I kept it.)

All of Tori's various mental health professionals over the years have told us not to allow Rana contact with Tori because of the detrimental effect it has had on her the times we tried it. We have followed that advice. We never told Tori bad things about her mother - a lesson I learned many, many years ago after I divorced my first husband - but Tori's grandmother told her plenty of bad things in graphic detail and "living color" as the TV promos used to proclaim during my childhood.

Now Rana is back on the scene and she is the one dishing the dirt. Too bad she isn't dishing the truth. Tori has been variously hysterical, weepy, and conciliatory about the situation. My husband is very distressed and I am caught in the middle between Tori's desire to see Rana and Michael's determination that that will never happen. I see both points of view. I know that Rana has been an extremely toxic person in the past, but I don't know if she has changed (or not) over the last decade. I also know that the draw of a birth parent is very strong, the need/desire to know one's roots. And even though her family history has not been a secret from Tori, Rana owns the mystique of fantasy. She is the "real mother."

I also know that Rana manipulates everything and everyone, that she is a masterful reader of other people (street smarts and con artist finesse par excellence) and that she can look like Mother Theresa to anyone for a few hours at a time. I have already gotten a whiff of her sad story, the one she has undoubtedly been practicing for the last fourteen years, because she told Tori in a My Space email (before I cut that off) that Rana's mother and I turned her in to CPS unfairly because her mother wanted to get back at her and I wanted another child.

For those of you who did not know me then, I was desperately ill, in and out of hospitals, and in no way whatsoever was I looking for another child. Michael and I fought over the decision to take Tori in because he was so concerned about my health, but I felt like we had to do it, had a moral requirement to do it, for Tori. CPS was ready to place her with strangers and I didn't want her to disappear into the system.

OMG, when I think of all the struggles we have had since we first met Tori and Rana, it is frightening and astonishing all at the same time. But here we are. Tori is nearly seventeen. She is a kind-hearted, affection girl most of the time. She is going to graduate from high school in a year and plans to go to community college. At the same age, her mother was in the custody of the Texas Youth Commission for drug dealing and prostitution and, upon her release to a half way house at eighteen, would promptly get pregnant with Tori. Our daughter's life has turned out so much more hopefully than Rana's and I fear that recontact with Rana will knock her backwards.

The most terrifying part of raising Tori right this minute is her current fascination with having a baby. She talks about it all the time, how having a baby would give her someone who would always love her, how wonderful and cute baby's are, etc. It sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy leading up to a pregnancy to parallel her birth mother's pregnancy with her. I keep pushing the down side and encouraging her to think about college, career, husband, before she thinks about a child. Is that falling on deaf ears? I don't know. So far, she has not had that kind of relationship with a boy, so that gives me hope.

Yesterday, she had her last shot of three to protect her from the viruses that cause cervical cancer. I am so happy she could get that protection. I wish someone would invent a vaccine against bad choices. She needs that, too. We probably all do ...

Anyway, this situation is a big worry for me right now and I am struggling to find a balance between Michael, Tori, and "the forces of darkness" out there. It is interesting that Rana, in Spanish, means frog, and that there is a frog whose Latin name is almost identical to Rana's first and last names. The translation of this Latin name is "fanged frog." How apt. The fanged frog is back in our lives. How I wish that I could say to Tori today what I could say to her a week ago, "I don't know where Rana is. She knows where we live and she could contact us if she wanted to."

Ciao.

Life is Sweet: Mother's Day and Graduation All in One Week

2008-05-12T21:50:00.003-05:00

Could life be any sweeter? Sunday my family feted me in grand style to show their love for me and this coming Saturday my son Nick will graduate from Tulane University with his degree in Political Economy. What wonderful events to bracket a week with. I feel blessed.

Mother's Day started a special greeting from my friend Dionne. Then I spent some time leisurely perusing the newspaper in bed with a cup of coffee. Mid-morning I got a phone call from Julia, Nick's fiancee, wishing me a happy Mother's Day. And later on, Michael prepared a luscious brunch featuring baked, cream-cheese filled, nut-topped, French toast, bacon, and orange juice. While he got brunch ready, Victoria gave me her gift: a video she created for me with photographs of her as a little girl, some sweet music, and wonderful captions. It made me cry. When we went in to brunch, I found a gorgeous, pink-tinged, white hydrangea with four large balls of blooms sitting on the table.

After brunch, I dragged my sated self to the living room and finished reading the paper, then jumped in the shower to freshen up for company. Alix and Adam came over in the early afternoon and indulged me by playing cards - a fun new game I found called aBridged - and then starting a new jigsaw puzzle with me. We had a very good time, although the thousand-piece puzzle will require a lot more work before I finish it.

While we were playing cards and working puzzles, past-times Michael doesn't enjoy - he fixed dinner, gracing us with rib eye steak, baked potatoes, and a lovely fresh salad. This is the first time he has fired up his grill in several months and the results can only be described as mouth-watering. Everyone had a dish of ice cream for dessert before Alix and Adam had to go. Later in the evening, I received a Mother's Day call from Nick.

I felt pampered and loved and cherished all day long. Thank you to everyone who made sure I got the most from this holiday! And I am blessed by the fact that my mother is still alive and I get to talk with her regularly and see her at least once a year. I sent her a lovely hand-thrown bird feeder shaped (and colored) like a robin's egg for Mother's Day although she told me she was hesitant to use it as a bird feeder because it is so pretty.

The most wonderful part of this cornucopia of Mother's Day blessings is that it doesn't have to be Mother's Day for me to be treated so well. My family shows me these kindnesses on a regular basis. Michael is always generous with his time and attentions, solicitous of my needs and desires; Tori is a tender-hearted young woman who wants nothing more than to please the people she cares about. My adult children and their partners are wonderful to me, too, as are my many friends.

If it sounds like I'm bragging, I am! I have a lot to brag about when it comes to my loved ones and friends.

Add to that the upcoming festivities at Tulane University and I am a thoroughly happy woman. Nick has worked hard to get his degree and it has not been easy for him. He persevered, though,even paying for most of it himself. It will be a real joy to watch him receive that diploma this Saturday. Julia will be there, along with her mother and sister, so I expect we will have a lot of fun over the weekend. (Not to mention that it is our first visit to New Orleans.)

I am really feeling great about life these days.

Ciao.

Miscel-Lanie

2008-04-14T11:05:00.003-05:00

All my recent serious thinking and writing dissuades me from tackling another BIG topic. So I've decided on miscel-Lanie, that special category of stuff that comes to my restless mind. Foremost is a big topic, but I won't give it big treatment today because I couldn't sleep last night and I am too unfocused.

Dateline: Texas A&M University, last weekend, Fay Lectures in Jungian Psychology. Michael and I attended together and heard four scintillating - but sometimes baffling - lectures by Joe Cambray on synchronicity. Cambray's lectures will be a book by next year and I probably need to read it to understand a lot of his points, but I got the gist of it. My No. 1 favorite new knowledge from the weekend? This Indian myth, written 2,500 or so years ago, apparently is an explanation of modern field theory physics. (See aside.) That is astonishing in itself, but I fell in love with the illustrations. If you search Indra's Net or Indra's Pearls, you will find a lot of fabulous renderings.

Aside: Indra's Pearls reside on a great net that spans the heavens. At each juncture of the net, there lies a pearl. Each of these pearls reflects all the other pearls into infinity. Through this reflection, each pearl is connected to every other pearl, thus a change to one reflects in all. FYI, Indra is a male god also known as the King of the Gods.

This weekend, Michael and I saw a play - Under the Lintel - at the Alley Theatre in the small theater downstairs. We have season tickets and have sat in the same place for several years. Right in the front row immediately next to one of the actors entrances. I sit on the corner and have had everything under the sun walk, run, or be carted by in close proximity, including a fellow trussed upside and bleeding from a torture session. This time nothing came in that way, but the actor exited there.

John Tyson did a great job of portraying a meek librarian turned into a quester of epic proportions as he sought the mythical Wandering Jew. Very well done, a globe trotting mystery played out in one room with one actor. Bravo.

I began a drawing course two weeks ago and am now entertaining myself immensely by making fairly accurate renderings of spheres, cubes, cones, and pyramids. Also, eggs. I'm quite good at drawing eggs with their shadows. Today I am going to tackle a crumpled piece of paper which I understand is much harder. I always wanted to be able to toss off a drawing that looked good, but I have learned in two lessons that planning is important in drawing and I will probably not be "tossing" anything soon!

I have cat trouble. My two cats are getting on - both 14 years-old this spring. Trixie is a small tortoise shell who is extremely timid. I adopted her out of a paper bag that the SPCA had put in her crate for her to hide in. I hate to think of what her early kittenhood was like. After 14 years of extreme patience and coaxing on my part, she has actually laid on my lap three times in the last year. She also started pooping right outside her litter box in the last year. That does not make me happy.

Jack is our big cat. Recently he's lost some weight and is down to 18 pounds. Jack, unfortunately, is the lap cat! When he sits on your lap, you are pinned down, so you better have the phone and anything else you need in handy reach. Jack is unhappy about something and he is letting us know by peeing places that are inappropriate, like my new sofa. Thank goodness I had it scotch-guarded just after it was delivered. Oh, and both of them throw up, Trixie on the carpet in my bedroom even though the whole rest of her domain is tiled!

So, if you have any advice on how to cure these problems. We have exhausted our resources and have no more ideas. I'm ready to chuck them both - which creates astounding guilt in me - but Michael really, really doesn't want me to do that. Ain't we got fun?

Ciao.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Me

2008-04-04T10:46:00.003-05:00

In April 1968, I was a 17-year old white girl in Grand Forks, North Dakota, a high school senior at a very small Catholic high school. My combination of naïveté, sheltered upbringing, and idealism couldn't have been stronger. The only black people I actually knew were two fellow students whose parents brought them in from the Grand Forks Air Base to attend my school. One, a handsome and fair-skinned boy who excelled at athletics, became the darling of all the girls and was way out of my league socially. Another, Caroline, had a dark complexion and a plump figure. Quiet and reserved, she and I became friends.

During my first and only visit to Caroline's house on base, I had my come-to-Jesus moment of understanding that race made no difference. Up 'til then, she had been my exotic friend, part of the "other," a "them" in the age-old game of "us against them." But when my parents dropped me off at her home, something miraculous happened to me. Caroline's family had a dog, a big, friendly, German Shepherd. That dog acted just like all the dogs my family had ever had - it loved Caroline and Caroline's family. In a flash of insight, I realized that the dog did not know this family was black, it just knew that they loved him. And I understood that they were not, in fact, different in any meaningful way from me and my family. Our dogs loved us, too.

Perhaps this sounds silly to a more sophisticated audience, but I lacked sophistication then and for many years after. It is hard to be sophisticated when your world is so small, when life is so predictable, when everyone around looks essentially just like you. I had an intellectual knowledge of the Civil Rights movement and I had opinions about Civil Rights (more on these topics later), but until Caroline, all that knowledge in my head, not in my heart. My friendship with Caroline, and especially that moment of insight with her dog, moved Civil Rights from my head to my heart and soul.

My parents supported the Civil Rights movement. Among their peer group, they were liberals, standing up against discrimination and the plight of black people in the South. (For us, in North Dakota, race seemed like a Southern issue, although it obviously was not.) I vividly remember the first march on Selma, Alabama, led by Dr. King. My father brought our television set out to the dining room so we could watch news coverage during dinner. Watching TV during dinner had literally never happened at our house. I don't even remember it during the days following the Kennedy assassination two years earlier. But there the TV sat, itself in black and white, showing a valiant struggle of blacks against whites and the terrible results.

My father said, after watching for some time, "If I was any kind of a man, I would be there marching with them, but I'm too afraid. I have seven children who depend on me and I am too cowardly to take the risk." A year or two earlier, my dad had been offered a fantastic career opportunity that would allow him to get his Ph. D. in microbiology with full time pay and then go to work for the company that sponsored the post-graduate work. The job required him to move us to Raleigh, North Carolina. Although I know he wanted the job very badly, Dad declined it because he feared taking the family into the South at that volatile time.

From my mother especially, I had long understood that racism and prejudice were wrong. We were not allowed to use any type of racial or ethnic slur in our speech, including the word "gyp," as in, "He gypped me out of ten dollars." The reason, my mother told us, was that gyp was a slur against gypsies and she did not allow its use in her house any more than she allowed n*****.

Aside: My upbringing was so strong, and my adult experiences with race so vivid, that I just can't bring myself to write the n-word in my blog. But I did hear the n-word several times, from two of my five brothers, at my parents' home after I grew up, married a black man, and had a bi-racial daughter. One used it as a dig, saying stuff to me like, "How are things in n*****town?" when I would come home to visit. The other yelled at me to "Take you n***** kid and get the hell out of Grand Forks." right before he threw me against my child's playpen and broke my ribs in four places. My relationship with a black man and my daughter changed everything about race in my family of origin. For many years, the changes were negative, but eventually, they turned positive. That's another blog entry.

Now, for Martin Luther King, Jr. His assassination on this day forty years ago rocked me, but it also hardened me against racism. The idealism that had been cracked by Kennedy's killing, fractured at King's. And when Bobby Kennedy was shot just two months later, I almost despaired. This day is sad because of the death itself, because of the riots that it engendered, and because of all the hope that it extinguished in people of all colors and races and nationalities, even in the whitest of us, a Swedish-German-English school girl from North Dakota. But it also cemented our resolve to change the world and launched something bigger than even Martin Luther King, Jr. His tragic death created even more action than his inspirational life had and, although he would have deplored the violent methods some people used, I think he would have approved overall of what we have accomplished in forty years.

Notes from Inside My Bathroom Vanity

2008-03-31T13:59:00.003-05:00

I listened to Michael’s unhappiness increase from grumbling to roaring, with a liberal helping of swearing heaped on. The faucet on his side of the bathroom vanity started leaking a few days earlier and had created quite a mess, so we had a hot date at Home Depot and picked up two new faucets. (The general intention at the time was that we can't upgrade his without upgrading mine.) Michael’s temper arose from his attempt - apparently futile - to install the first faucet.

When the noise level became alarming, I checked in with him to see if I could help in any way. His exasperation showed through quite clearly when he told me no. The man practically rolled his eyes.

Aside: A little history is in order here. Michael knows how to do handyman stuff, but he does not accomplish those types of tasks elegantly. It always takes much longer than anticipated; it always requires at least one trip to the hardware store in the middle of the project; and it always generates a mess of epic proportions. On the other hand, I don't necessarily know how to do all the tasks, but I have an intuitive understanding of the mechanics of things. I can look at them and unravel the puzzle of how they go together, figure out what the problem is, and make at least a good start at fixing them. The way I see it, Michael works the brute strength and training aspect while I work the problem solving and finesse aspect. Together, we make a great team.

Okay, we make a great team, but only if Michael lets me be on his team. And when his team is losing, he apparently doesn't want his wife coming in and saving the day. At least, that is how it seemed on Saturday.

I'll spare you the details, but bottom line, it turned out that Michael needed to get inside the vanity cabinet and he did not fit. (I think the not fitting made him as angry as any of it.) So I crawled in and, haltingly, did the work. Of course, all the fittings were over tightened and wouldn't come off. While I fit in the cabinet, my brute strength quotient is fairly low and therefore the struggle went on for hours.

I know many of my readers can't help but ask what it feels like to crawl inside a bathroom vanity. In a word - lousy. The vanity opening (Michael removed the doors) is a generous 21 inches wide; however, that 21 inches is divided by a 3 inch upright board, leaving 9 actual inches on either side to squeeze ones body through watching out for the door hinges all the while.

Michael couldn't manage it because his upper body parts are not flexible, like mine. So, picture this: I thrust my head and shoulders into a very dim, dank, hole and then I flatten my breasts out to get them through. Once I have accomplished Operation Booby Trap, I pull my bottom arm in. If I have to - and mostly I did have to - I can flip myself a little sideways and manage to squash my other arm in. At this point, dear reader, I must rely on my lower ribs to support my body. My lower ribs are, of course, resting directly on a narrow, raised, piece of wood.

The vanity is 21 inches deep. I'm pretty sure my body is longer than 21 inches from head to waist. Heck, I was 21 inches long when I was born! So, once thrust inside the sink, I must become a contortionist. A contortionist with tools, albeit the wrong tools for most of the time. Periodically, I would simply have to get out. Under-the-sink makes in-the-MRI seem like a walk in the park. The reverse of wedging oneself in requires a whole other level of commitment. First slide out the top arm, then pull out the top breast. Then scoot backwards and pull out the second breast. Finally, more scooting to release the shoulders, bottom arm, and head. And don't lift your body up - kind of a natural action when exiting - because you will hit your head on the sink bottom.

While inside, I faced other challenges as well, most notably UFOs settling on my cheek or neck with a ticklish, creepy sensation. But what really grossed me out when the UFOs landed in my mouth. The very worst UFO event occurred when a tiny piece broke off a large plastic nut I was trying to wrestle into submission and landed in my eye.

All I could think of was imminent blindness or at least a trip to the hospital. I desperately wanted out from under the sink and that is exactly when my chances of getting out seemed most hopeless. I panicked. I hit my head on the underside of the sink. I scraped my arm (the top one) trying to withdraw it. Once I had my arm out, my breasts got caught in a vise grip that had not existed until that very moment. With one arm inside and one arm outside, my head and shoulders inside, and my lower trunk and legs akimbo outside, I tried to smash my ample bosom flat enough to pop it out. Yes, I did escape and, with Michael's help, located the eyewash cup in under a minute. The piece of plastic washed out without any trouble, although my eye felt gritty for the rest of the day.

At this point, I thought to ask Michael for safety glasses (of which we have several sets in our garage). Note to self: put safety glasses before sticking head in small opening and banging away on things that are stuck.

By Saturday evening, we had the new faucet installed and I just needed to crawl back inside to do the final quarter-turn tightening on the water lines. Which I did. Except, according to Michael, the hot water leaks and I have to go back to retighten that one. Oh, and put in the new faucet on MY side of the vanity. Now, all I have to do is decide if I'd rather crawl under my sink and install the matching faucet or stay safely away from the vanity cabinet and live with mismatched faucets.

What do you think?

Ciao

A Blogging Primer

2008-03-18T15:45:00.005-05:00

(Presented to WIVLA as part of a panel discussion on 3-18-08)

Blog is a word coined from the phrase web log (as in Captain’s Log). A web log is to a website as a film is to a still photograph: both contain images, but one uses dynamic images and the other uses static ones. (Thanks to a fellow blogger for the idea. See http://www.zylstra.org/blog/archives/001145.html.)

Bloggers want to keep a running, dynamic record of their thoughts, idea, complaints, visions, products, families, ad infinitum and to do that, they write posts, or messages, that are published in real-time on the internet in a blog.

The reason that a person wants to blog determines the type of blog to set up. For example, you can blog as a personal journal and for this would likely choose a private blog which no one else can see without access to your ID and password. Or you might want to set up a blog for a group to use equally - a critique group or extended family, for example. Group blogs can be read and written into by any member of the group, making planning, brainstorming, and other group activities easier. A group blog can be private or public.

Public blogs are intended to be read by anyone who happens along. Public blogs can be controlled by the owner insofar as whether or not comments will be accepted and from whom; whether those comments must be approved or moderated by the blog’s owner; and whether the comments can be anonymous or not. There are many variables that the blog owner can control and the owner’s purpose or intention for the blog will define how she sets up her blog.

Before you do anything else to create your own blog, go on an afternoon or evening’s jaunt around the blogosphere. Read other peoples blogs at random. You will be AMAZED by the variety, topics, formats, languages, and creativity abounding there. You will undoubtedly be offended, tickled, perplexed, and outraged along the way but you will get a much better notion of what a blog can be and do. Read comments, as well, because that will help you make some choices as you put your blog together.

Once you determine the purpose of your blog - a social blog, a retail blog, a political blog, a personal blog, or a group blog - you need a title for it. Have the title ready before you sign up because it is practically the first question asked in the process and if you aren’t prepared, you might pick a title that you come to regret. Make your title reflect your intention. “Mary’s Musings” is not a great title for a hard-driving political blog; “Front and Center with Mary” may not be the best title for a recipe-sharing blog.

You have your intention and your title. Now you need a blog host; someplace to house your posts. There are many, many websites offering blog hosting. Rather than tell you about them in abbreviated fashion, let me refer you to a good, educational website with lots of information: http://www.thefreecountry.com/webhosting/freeblogging.shtml. This site will give you not only the information you need to make good choices but also links that will let you look before you leap and comparison shop.

I have blogged at Blogspot (a.k.a. Blogger, and now owned by Google) for four years. It offers lots of help for beginners and lots of advanced features for experienced bloggers. It is a large, well-known blogging host and not likely to disappear with my 123 precious posts.

Speaking of which, even if you are just blogging as a complete lark, you must immediately start saving your posts to a back-up site. Who knows when the worst might happen and they slide into oblivion forever? Who knows what your lark may turn into two or three or six or ten years from now? Your blog posts might end up being your best-seller or an important record of when you sold a certain piece of art, there’s just no telling.

As a writer, I worried about the safety of my blog posts. In my research about this concern, I came across a website called Creative Commons. In the organization’s own words,

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved. We're a nonprofit organization. Everything we do — including the software we create — is free.”

You can find Creative Commons at http://creativecommons.org/.

I first put CC on my blog in November 2004, but somewhere along the line I made a template change and lost it, something I just fixed today. Templates are the framework of your blog and good blogging hosts offer a wide assortment of templates for different purposes. Don’t be afraid to make template changes, but when you do, be sure to keep track of the different elements of your blog so everything gets put back.

The last thing I want to mention today is blogger courtesy. Don’t borrow without attribution and, whenever possible, publish the link right there in your blog so your reader can go to the source for more information. Promote your favorite blogs and websites, too. Cross-linking with like-minded blogs is a great way to get your blog read by more people.

Ciao!

The Continuing Curse of ISMs

2008-03-17T23:35:00.003-05:00

I listened to callers and commentary on a progressive radio station tonight and the curse of ISMs reared its ugly head once again. I feel frustrated and irritated about the pervasive prejudice that still gets bandied about without being challenged.

Aside: Before you get all "I'm not prejudiced" on me, take a deep breath. I am talking about institutional prejudices and cultural prejudices that persist in our society. I know people who truly believe that they harbor no racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation prejudices yet who display them on a regular basis. These people are rarely challenged because institutional and cultural prejudice is, by its very nature, insidious.

What am I talking about? First, let me give credit for opening my eyes on this subject to one of those two great, sister, advice columnists - Ann Landers or Dear Abby. (I really can no longer remember who, I read the column perhaps thirty years ago, but I have never, ever forgotten it.)

Now, here's the gem of wisdom.

When a person uses gender, racial, ethnic, or sexual orientation as an adjective or as a descriptive term, the person is displaying prejudice - often unconsciously - UNLESS the adjective or descriptive is required for clarity or is germane to the topic at hand - because using that adjective or descriptive word indicates that you find it to be outside the norm.

Examples: a woman doctor, a black lawyer, a homosexual father, a Muslim politician.

The test for this is to restate the label with its "expected" gender, racial, ethnic, or sexual orientation descriptive and see if it sounds stupid.

Examples: a man doctor, a white lawyer, a heterosexual father, a Christian politician. Just for kicks, try this one: a heterosexual couple. If that sounds redundant, you need to give yourself a good talking to.

We don't say a "man" doctor because we expect doctors to be men. Likewise, we expect lawyers to be white, fathers to be straight, and politicians (at least in America) to be Christian. Or, some people do. And even people who can happily accept a black doctor or woman lawyer in actuality may still bow to the institutional prejudice that says it is somehow unusual, unexpected, or rare.

After hearing me praise my rheumatologist, a friend who also has lupus asked me for a referral, which I happily gave. A couple of months later, I ran into the person and asked how the doctor's visit had gone. My friend said, "Oh, I loved Dr. P., but you didn't tell me he was black."

No, I didn't. And why would I? Does Dr. P. being black have anything to do with his skills and qualifications as a doctor? Not at all. But how many times have you heard someone refer to a "black doctor" as if this were a revelation?

Aside: And, no, I didn't give you any hints about the gender of my friend either, because what, really, does gender have to do with friendship or displays of prejudice? I could have really turned that little example into a nice condemnation of somebody by adding a touch of gender, a hint of religious persuasion, and the lightest tint of color, couldn't I?

Those of you younger than I am (57) may not remember the consternation caused by a riddle that popped up in the 1970s. It went like this: A boy was injured in a car accident. He was rushed to the hospital by his father. The emergency room doctor, upon seeing the boy, exclaimed, "I can't work on this child. He is my son." How could this be?

Believe it or not, you young'uns, people were absolutely baffled by this riddle. All kinds of suggestions would be raised - stepson, adopted son, mistaken identity, etc. - before people would give up and say, "This must be a trick question."

Can you guess the answer? I hope it is very obvious to today's reader. The doctor was the boy's mother. But in the 70s, this notion was almost heretical. Oh, we had women doctors; we just didn't think about them or think there were enough of them to be worth considering seriously, even for the purposes of a riddle.

I raised my children on the Rule of ISMs: Never use an adjective or descriptive word to describe someone's gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation unless you have a specific and pertinent reason to do so.

Example: If a woman friend wants a referral to an ob-gyn and expresses a preference for a female physician for this very personal care, it's okay to say something like, "I know a really good woman doctor you might like."

I am hard put to come up with additional examples because I rarely find a reason to qualify people by physical or cultural attributes. And I am not trying to be holier-than-thou; it's just that I have been practicing this for 30 years and I've gotten pretty darn good at doing it.

If you aren't already following the Rule of ISMs, please start now. If you already do, thanks from the bottom of my heart. You are making the world a better place for all of us.

Ciao!

P.S. And a Happy St. Patrick's Day to all of you from the very Irish Devereux clan. (I figure that bit of ethnic reference is completely appropriate given the day, although, by way of full disclosure, I must admit that I am Swedish-German- English and not a bit Irish meself.)

Finding my Feminist Roots: When Being the Best is Undercut By Being a Woman

2008-03-02T15:17:00.010-06:00

With the Texas primary coming up on Tuesday, I have been thinking long and hard about who to vote for. Of course, I am going to vote in the Democratic primary - and attend the caucus afterward - but that shouldn't surprise anyone who reads my blog. Clearly, I am a left-leaning liberal feminist from way, way back.

Our choices this year seem like an embarrassment of riches. The excitement of having either a woman or a black person run for president is electrifying. But I have great ambivalence about which candidate best represents my beliefs. Michael and I have been discussing this off and on for several months.

Michael went ahead and voted early one lunch hour at a polling place very convenient to his job. I waited because I haven't been certain who to vote for. I am as susceptible as anyone to the excitement Obama generates and I find him very reminiscent of John Kennedy in his ability to engage the younger generations. (Kennedy died when I was 13.) On the other hand, Clinton is stronger in experience and political savvy. I do not think that "outsiders" really make it in Washington because they don't have the political green stamps and skeleton-in-the-closet knowledge to use in making deals.

My grade school education taught me that our government works on a quid pro quo basis - you help me and I'll help you; you cross me and I'll get you back. Compromise in Congress, compromise between the executive and congressional branches, compromise that has been taken too far with lobbyists but that's another blog. I think Hillary will be far better prepared to negotiate those rocky shoals than Obama. (Compare Lyndon Johnson with Jimmy Carter to get my drift.)

On Friday, Michael and I engaged in yet another discussion of the primary race. I asked him who he had voted for and he indicated Clinton. (I have his permission to reveal that to the world.) I told him that, after much internal debate, I had pretty much decided to vote for Obama. I then asked his reasons and he basically said everything I just stated above. He went a step further and told me that his vote was win/win for him because he voted for the person he thought would be best, but he would be okay if Obama won, going back to the unprecedented situation of a black person and a woman both in serious contention for the Democratic Party's nomination for president.

Musing about this for a minute, Michael added that he remembered learning in college (which hasn't been so long ago for him) that the social hierarchy in America consisted of white men, black men, white women, black women. Privilege and opportunity, acceptance by society followed those rankings.

That rang a bell for me, also and got me thinking. I said to Michael, "We have an older experienced white woman contending with a younger, less experienced, but charismatic black man. What if the roles were reversed? Let's say an older, more experienced black man versus a younger, less experienced, but charismatic white women?" And then I stopped in my tracks, caught by an aha! moment.

There would never be such a competition in our society as it exists today. There could not be a white female or black female Obama. That person would never have made it out of the starting gate. I know it as surely as I know my own name. Michael agreed wholeheartedly when I told him what had occurred to me.

When I went to graduate school, the head of my department told me pointblank that my talents would outstrip my male colleagues because a mediocre man could get into programs that only an exceptional woman could attain. He cautioned me that I might be disappointed in the abilities of the men around me.

Apparently, the same conditions apply to politics today: It takes a superbly talented and experienced woman to get into the political game that a relatively inexperienced - albeit charismatic - man can get into.

Aside: I attended graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis on a full tuition scholarship in a new program that called Technology and Human Affairs that has since morphed into Engineering and Public Policy. Lacking an undergraduate science degree, I could no longer get into this program, but at the beginning it was multi-disciplinary.

You know, I feel terrible about this realization. I feel betrayed in a way. I (among many other people) worked so hard for women's rights in my lifetime and what has it gotten? The chance for a woman to play with the boys, but not on a level playing field. All this has made me decide to vote for Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama. He is young and charismatic and he has a future in politics, but let him earn a few more stripes in political service before going to the head of the line in the Democratic Party for 2008's election.

Clinton is experienced, dedicated, and a work horse by all accounts. Even her opponents in Congress applaud her work ethic and her bipartisanship. She is ready to step into the Oval Office and I think she should be the Democratic candidate for President this year. She can beat McCain because she knows the ropes. Even the polls, flawed though they may be, show Clinton besting Obama against McCain. And that is what this is about, right?

I want a Democrat back in the White House. I'll support Obama if he is the party's choice, but my heart - and my vote - is with Hillary Clinton.

Ciao!

PS As they say in Chicago, "Vote early and often!"

Carmina Burana Heaven

2008-02-25T10:52:00.013-06:00

I hate to take attention away from Killing the Angel in the House (see last post), but I had such a moving experience on Saturday night that I really want to memorialize it. Michael, Tori, Alix and Adam, friends Tony and Eric, and I went to the Houston Symphony Chorus and Houston Symphony's performance of the Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein and Carl Orff's stirring Carmina Burana.

Aside: The Houston Symphony Chorus members are volunteers!! Imagine all the work they do just for the love of music. I applaud them doubly for this. My friend June Russell sings in the chorus. She has a lovely voice and when M. and I viewed the recording from his recent birthday party, we discovered that she had sung a special Happy Birthday to him. (See my post New Years and Brass Bands for more on the birthday bash.) June is also a great photographer.

I love the Carmina Burana. My son Nick is responsible for bringing it into our family's consciousness more than ten years ago. I actually have the music downloaded onto my iPod Shuffle. It creates a unique rhythm for working out at the gym.

Last year, the Houston Ballet performed the Carmina Burana as a dance, musical components interwoven with the ballet. They had three full choirs singing, two adult and one children's. The stage practically overflowed with bodies. That experience in music and dance exceeded any artistic performance I have ever seen in sheer majesty and power. The Symphony and the Symphony Chorus had their own power, though. We had orchestra seats and thus fantastic visual and aural experiences. (At the ballet, the orchestra was hidden in the pit and we were seated in the Grand Tier.)

I thought the violins would burst into flame a few times because their playing was so phenomenally fast. The vocal soloists delivered such wonderful performances that I can scarcely find the words to describe it. There was lots of emoting, including some cutting up and hamming. During the "swan song," the soloist sang from the audience and actually stood right behind us for part of his delivery.

But I must give the most credit the the chorus. Their range in this composition is so challenging. The seamlessness of their performance awed me and literally brought me to tears. Thank you Houston Symphony Chorus, Houston Symphony, (the name unknown to me) Children's Chorus, and soloists for a performance that thrilled me, made me laugh, and made me cry from sheer joy.

Ciao