47th Page & Light

moving on

2008-09-10T11:30:00.000-07:00

I've begun a new blog on Wordpress.com, called Jasminetree, because of it being my favorite Portland blooming tree specimen of all time, and if there is still anyone checking here for a new post, follow the link to the new page, if you like.

Thanks for reading 47thpageandlight.

Laura

High Noon

2008-07-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

Twelve page paper due tomorrow, so here I show up, if only to stall long enough to say I have found some great ideas for the new blog format, and that two compressed summer term classes at once is the height of stupidity. Never again, unless I'm not working and drive instead of bus it.

Hopefully, I will still be able to put words together after today (in English).

For some reason, FaceBook scares me. Like that "SecondLife" online reality game. Creepy.

Due to Circumstances Beyond Our Control---

2008-07-06T22:47:00.000-07:00

Avoidance is like a slow poison---building and building, greater and greater tolerance of it, now I've reached the point of there being no return to it, I cannot think about this now I have a 1000 word essay to write (and start even thinking about) and post before midnight, and it's now 9:30pm OMG.

Before my gorgeous friend Steven left on a long trip, he told me that re-defining is always my choice at anytime, and whatever feels outgrown or used up can be gently set aside or flung to high heaven. I was sitting in his darkened living room while he washed dishes in his Calvin briefs, and we were both pretending that he wasn't leaving town for almost forever in a day or two, and this was just another chat, la la la la la.

I told him I needed to change the whole blog idea now, or I was going to just stop doing it.

So much has shifted, things are so different, my ideas need a new vessel. And while I was making up my mind, it was ground to a complete halt. He kept washing, now doing the pots and pans, and said that he felt I needed to blast open the whole thing to incorporate more writing and not be so tied to a place or theme.

"Honey, we read blogs because we want to know about this amazing person writing them, and are your own favorite bloggers really tied to one specific theme? Didn't you stumble on them and then marveled at their writing and personality, and now read whatever they want to post?"

"Well, yeah, completely. But there had to be a thread of a theme that helped me find them in the first place...right?"

"Just write it, tell your friends to link to their friends with your address, it will get around."

I went home on that afternoon and sat looking at my new MacBook, pristine, glistening, fully charged with at least 5 hours of typing life, and knew I had to make a move. Once I got caught up with my Summer Term reading and writing assignments, and had a chance to think about anything other than school. Okay, so I'm barely caught up, but decided tonight that I would at least draw a line in the sand saying that this initial phase of blogging that began with the End of the B-store Life has drawn to a comfortable close. The transition is complete. I'm simmering some ideas and concepts to start a new blog focusing much more on writing (I think) and will most likely dive into it after exams are done mid-month. All the doors and windows will be thrown open and anything may look appropriate to me to launch into. I'll most likely link to it from here, in case anyone wants to try something new.

Think Like a Mediterranean

2008-06-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

First there was the lovely Friday evening beer cafe with the group known as 'the usual suspects', followed by the most sublime Thai garlic eggplant chicken I think I've ever had. Celebration #1.

Saturday was a splendid day spent outdoors, ending with an another lovely evening spent with some new kids in town going over the best of David Sedaris' audio works, sipping hot coffee and cognac around a big table in the low orange mood lights. Celebration #2.

Sunday I spent about three or four hours in the strong hot sun with my neighbors' free-ranging chickens acting like housecats and keeping the weeds down. Other than allowing myself to get much too dehydrated, it was pure Eden, glowing down into sunset and porch time til after 10.

Spring Term 2008 is over, put to bed, now a stack of course materials and textbooks in my living room, and the anxiously awaited grades online tomorrow. No lingering regrets this time, I am glad to wrap this term up, so I can go back to focusing on why I'm back in school in the first place; to savor the whole experience, not hoping it's over as soon as possible. Like being washed up on Trigonometry Island with just a box of damp matches.

Summer Term is one big Time Machine, Oregon history and two Ancient Greek Civilization classes to finish out my transfer student requirements. I've seen the syllabus for one 400-level class and there's a 12 page research paper due with a pre-approval bibliography submission. What have I done? The Fall Term will finish off the Greeks and bring in the Egyptians, Sumerians and pre-Greek Macedonians. What does any of this have to do with anthropology?

Well---not much really, but I needed some electives to fill out, and there weren't many anth. classes offered this summer, most of the department is going to be doing field work in the archaeology aspect of the field, and I needed to stick around to work and stay in school. Maybe next year.

Needing to stay disciplined to take an online class should prove a challenge, I've never taken one before that wasn't some kind of corporate training of brief duration. So this slides right in to the porch time, why not, better than caged in a classroom from 3:30 on every afternoon for a month. Out on the porch, laptop and books and pretending my tomatoes are really growing and becoming my nectar and ambrosial lunch.

Can't discuss tomatoes now, I wasn't planing on crying this early in the day.

Summer Begins (dress rehearsal)

2008-06-08T15:22:00.000-07:00

And I'm in the front row, on my porch, doing the last weekend of Astronomy homework EVER, and trying to get some solar remedial treatment for my head and chest cold. Alas, it is breezy and in the low 60s, a tad chilly to be in this tanktop and shorts, but I just keep moving into the widening band of sun.

It feels like I've been somewhere, even to me, like Spring Term was some sort of season on Survivor, a show I don't even watch. And I'm still on the island, somehow, holding the soggy torch and looking very pitiful. Sort of how my tomato plants look right now, waiting for the heat and sun, limping along, in their fixed tomato plant way. When we were through with April, I was happy to be done with it and don't need a three week nostalgic rehash of it in June.

Almost 4pm and the wind is still chilly, tarnation! Perhaps I should put the books and notes away, to show the proper sunshine readiness, to call in the blazing rays.

My neighbors' raised bed gardens are doing so much better than ours, with their fresh black sifted organic soils from Portland Nursery, and more shelter from the wind than ours. The inches of new mulch look great still, the herbs and roses look splendid, the lavender and lamb's ears are purple as far as the lot line. Next weekend, when exams and work are done for the week, I will come out here and make up for all the lost time I spent studying and writing papers for Keanu.
Who I am not giving a copy of my paper to after all. What if I wind up being a TA in the department and he's got students reading my paper on a sensitive chapter of my life? Eeww.
It's flattering and all, but I'm already over that and experiencing the relief of being done with his class and all the folderal of the dynamics in there.

Besides, he revealed that his real full-time job is being a writer and editor for something or some place, and this is just his part time gig, jacking people around in the name of anthropology.

This only raised my hackles some more. That's why he was grading my syntax and not the substance of my anthropology work. Putz! But I've moved on. Really.

Sure, this is merely stalling, taking a break from the second half of the dreaded-A practice exam. My head feels like a skewered cork you found under your refrigerator from a previous tenant, the dry coughing has blown my eardrums back and forth too many times to be good. "All I wanna do is have some sun..."

Softer Side of Keanu

2008-05-29T16:17:00.000-07:00

Oh krist, now he's asking me for a copy of my Pilgrimage paper, and being all nice to me.

As Jon Stewart said to John McCain last year, "Don't make me love you!!"

How to dither-dather a woman who writes? Sincere praise on her writing and wanting a personal copy will do it every time. Yikes, I fell right into flattery pond.

So, now I have to figure out what to say to him when I walk a copy to his office.
How about, "So Keanu, how do I get an A in your class? You nit-picked my first paper, quibbled over syntax on my midterm, and took off one symbolic point from my latest paper that you actually liked. What gives? I got an A in a much harder anthropology class last term when I had to learn human genome 101 in 10 weeks. What's the deal?"

Or---just slink in and slip it into his mailbox cubby and bolt.
As a former boss lady and ex-administrator, I am just dying to tell him how to improve his teaching methods, but then the Kwan Yin compassionate lotus fairy sees him struggling and wishes I could offer some support like a colleague who's in the weeds with a group of cashier trainees. He asks the class a question on the reading assigned for that day, and there's all this restless silence in the classroom for what seems like minutes, until I can't stand it anymore and offer the answer. He turns from the board and realizes it was me. This can happen three or four times an hour, unless I just won't play along. Yesterday it was political history with the Iran-Iraq war and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, or which earlier anti-immigrant backlash occurred with which peoples in the early 1900s. And why?

Okay, so I don't have the student loan debt load (yet), years in the field on site with a trowel, multi-degrees and office in the department, but the guy is only a year older than I am and I just can't defer to him. He's more like a neighbor standing out in front of his house with a dead smoking lawnmower and you want to just hand him a cold beer and offer your weed whacker.

One more week of classes, one last exam, then it's all just a smudge on my transcripts, how I couldn't manage an A in a class in my major that was basically writing assignments with no math or human genomes or science. Little dings, all in a row.

But he talks about his dog all the time, so I know he's not just a total creep.
One more week of watching the doe-eyed nursing student in the front row bending over in short skirts to retrieve her bookbag and looking to see if he's noticing.

Class dismissed.

Weeding in the Rain

2008-05-26T12:39:00.000-07:00

please read today's Poppalina

Washed my hands long enough to throw a load of clean clothes into the dryer, and check Poppalina, otherwise known as Shula in Australia, whom I adore and want to have a drink with someday. Okay, one of those swimming-pool sized mojitos complete with umbrellas and plastic jewel-colored monkeys hanging from the rim.

And pulling weeds in a misty rain rewards me with the complete 8" long withered roots of the freakin' dandelions and their cousins the thorny variety, and that is a Warm Fuzzy to we gardening types.

This has been a stiff term for me. It's almost over, no more Professor Keanu and astrophysics will return to being a hobby, thanks for all the software and the Hubble websites!

I got the job on campus with the bankers hours, and was beat tired after only the first week. Too funny. It will all blend in nicely with the rest of my life and classes, so I will sleep more, big deal. Having today off both work and school to make a a three day weekend was very restorative, hurling me out to the weed bed between loads of washing and chatting with neighbors, talking tomatoes. I added some borrowed mint varieties to the herb rock garden, cleared away some of the lambs ears obscuring the blooming thyme and blooming sages, and left space for the basils yet to be procured. My echinaceas came back, and now I'm thinking yarrow, both red and yellow. Portland Nursery again in my future. Another neighbor has some bronze fennel---wonder if he'd want some of these lambs ears? Another neighbor has some beautiful monarda, and Steven's getting rudebeckia. If it were up to me, I'd pull out all but one clump of the lambs ears and plant more lavenders, there are sweet white and pink varieties. A bunch of my mammoth sunflowers are emerging from the dirt, and four cucumber plants are ready to put in.

If we had a goat, these weeds would get eaten and recycled as fertilizer. I want to be an urban homesteader...

Hired-Up

2008-05-18T05:26:00.000-07:00

My interview for work went well enough on Monday that I was offered the job on Friday. The job I was iffy about for more money, not the library job I was excited about for less.

So after mulling it over for a few hours, I decided to sign on and re-join the working class, take the plunge, and as Dr Strangelove would say, "How I stopped worrying (about $$$) and learned to love the bomb," or Job. Whatever. Being two terms into the student experience, and actually looking at graduation for Summer 2009, I am not as worried about being sucked into a work situation that I enable by making myself indispensable to my boss, then finding my feet captured by quick-curing cement into the foundation workings of the established business. I can balance things better now after the hiatus and back-to-school trail, and I'm actually thinking how higher income can help me out with some things, like modern dentistry and and the urban homesteading ideas germinating in my noggin.

This Spring Term was tougher on me than I'd have thought, the astro-physical strain was high, and all those many equation-analyzing hours would not have been available to cover a real job and still squeak out a decent grade for this degree-requirement class. It's somehow all working out, and when the hiring manager replied to my acceptance email, she said my current class schedule was perfect for their scheduling needs for now, and being term oriented, schedules are always readjusted to accommodate the students' classtimes. I like this. Going forward, I'll be packing together as many Anthropology classes into each term as I can and don't see anything ahead as brain-reconfiguring as teaching myself Trigonometry by doing forensics on equation fragments to determine cause of impossible results. All that effort will now go back into my major classes, and brainspace for learning a new workplace culture and software system.

And it is summer, after all. Finally picked up some plants for the garden yesterday morning, some hearty tomato starts at Fred Meyer's Founders Day sale, and those quaint forget-me-nots I've been craving since forever for that shady corner under the mock orange bush. In Michigan my grandparents had a pink version of it too, and the blue with some pink carpeted the shade under the huge lilac bushes by the rhubarb patch. The cheerful purple and yellow faces of johnny-jump-up pansies rounded it out as a border. They all reseeded and came back after every harsh Michigan winter. Slowly, but steadily, I am gaining ground in the ultimate conversion of this home into a facsimile of the family 1902 homestead that I loved so much growing up. Okay, a mix of that and the Bath Street house, the two old houses I hated to leave behind. We double Cancers are just a mess with this house business, I've surrendered completely to it and have much more peace now. It just is this way.

Four cucumber plants, five types of tomatoes, beans, peas, peppers, sunflowers, herbs, and now I'm thinking potatoes. A trip to the Limbo organic market for some specimens to let go spiky with sprouting eyes, to cut up and plant in a big pot like Kathy does, and where can lettuce fit in, and a bush soybean? Sprouts of Texas red grapefruit seeds are working in a shallow sushi tray and I started another avocado pit in water. These of course are hot climate dreams, or the beginnings of cultured trees in a conservatory to be built when the neighbors gather to re-claim the lot where Steven's house is. He still plays along that it's okay to have his house moved off the lot and donate it to charity, so his 'friendly' neighbors can converge on the plot and create the communal garden space with bamboo tea house I've been dreaming of. What a great sport.

I've Done a Bad Thing

2008-05-15T21:47:00.000-07:00

Bad, as in thoughtless, careless, unwittingly mindless, self-absorbed happiness foot in mouth stupid.

The other day, while chatting with my gorgeous neighbor Steven, I realized I was going on and on in a bubbling brook of happiness sort of way, and upon hearing the actual words coming out of my mouth, I stopped, and had to apologize, in a very female sort of way.

It sounded like bragging, and I was horrified. "Steven, ohmigod, you do understand, right, that all of this wonderful school miracle good fortune that is surrounding me these days makes me pinch myself all the time in wonderment, I don't mean that I'm just so fucking fabulous, I am just in complete amazement after all those years of slogging in the B-store trenches and the 25 years of not being able to do this, that I'm giddy happy and---" and he cut me off.
"Of course my dear, and it is so nice to really talk with someone at length about good things going on, and I get it, I really do, you're genuinely happy and it's great! Don't worry about anything with this and me, okay?" What a generous pal he is. But it happened today with someone else, and after a comment they made off-handedly, I realized "Oh oh, oh no, I just meant to communicate that they shouldn't worry, things were improving and financially were on the upswing after some tough times, it wasn't meant as a boast, really!" Oh bloody hell, now I just have to sit quiet and say "Fine," when asked how school is going, limit it to "great!" and not reveal my amazement that it's all still happening, it isn't being yanked out from under me somehow, inexplicably, just stop there. Shit.

There is still this feeling of it all being unreal somehow, it can't last, it will get ripped away somehow like it did the last time, this thing that meant everything to me. It's unfair for me to assume people I know here in Portland would just know this about me, they haven't known me that long, they met me as a B-store drone, and so, okay, fine, you're finishing a degree, great, so shut up already. I can get carried away, but never ever meant to offend. Crap.

Of course, there is a volume of back-story about this, and I won't pour it all out here except to say that there was always a pattern of my academic achievements being sloughed off as no big deal, pipe down, go do your chores, don't act so big. So more unfinished business regarding school, as well as the plowing through the final credit hours. I'm just happy this is all happening, and I want to go all the way, and I don't want to be a jerk.

"--til the lady in the pantsuit says it is"

2008-05-12T22:26:00.000-07:00

My girl is not winning the race and it's affecting me in a truly deep way, I feel very subdued. It's hard to explain, because I'm suffering from campaign fatigue like everyone else, and wanted it to be August 6 months ago already. She was ahead then, if I had only known what I was wishing for.

So many of my hopes were pinned on her winning, and of seeing her run against McCain, and the thrill of watching her inauguration as the first woman president of my country, I lived to see it, and I voted her in, and would probably cry watching the magnificent moment of her taking the oath, with Bill holding the bible tearing up himself, like he does. It had already all played out in my heart and after 8 years of Bush Purgatorio, 2009 was going to be off to such a great start.

So, now the re-grouping. It has been a high tide of many emotions, and my wave is now a mere line of bubbles in the sand, hissing into silence. Silly me, I let myself get carried up in it, all those years of feminism in my hair was now the real world. My satisfaction was tangible. She was my highest ambition coming true, liberal values and equality taking over at last! I feel kinda lost.

Of course, Barack Obama is another great candidate, another history-making moment to be alive and witnessing, and I am proud that we've reached this point, certainly. As candidates, they weren't that far apart, and I'm not a Democratic Party zealot, I go for the person more than the affiliation. But my heart isn't in it for him, he's not my guy. I'm not sending him any of my money, I'm tired of hearing about how he never was for the war, as if anyone but Bush/Cheney had a hard-on for American soldiers and Iraqi civilians being killed. That slant may sway the kids I go to school with, but to me it sounds empty, Obama wasn't even a Senator yet and wasn't in a position to even vote on it, so shut up already about it, it sounds lame. Inexperience speaks loudly for itself. But my disappointment is making me bitter. Barring some horrific October Surprise, I'll probably be voting for him, knowing he is gathering a SWAT team of movers and shakers that Hillary would have hired, so it may all even out some.

Besides, there's all those girls and young women who now take this new threshold as the New Reality Base, and will go on from here, and that does warm my heart. Always forward, no more Disney-style Neo-con Nostalgia for a Myth that never was real for the majority of us. I hope Obama exceeds my expectations and graciously moves us ahead, and shows the Republicans how it should be done. I like all the boxing gloves I see at Hillary rallies, and I wonder if she'll try again. As all women in the trenches know, you cannot quit, you cannot wimp out, you cannot whine or make excuses or do anything to appear weak and ineffectual. There's those sneering critics just waiting for a chance to gloat that "she couldn't take the heat!" The women pundits know why she hasn't quit, and sit there with their hands folded pretending to listen to the guys go on and on about it back and forth, and don't reveal the reason. But we know why. You cannot quit, ever.

Start of Porch Season

2008-05-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

At last, ma cherie, it is time for the languid and curried hours of porch love---oh, how we have missed you, fickle mistress, during your endless stay in your sister Persephone's guest cottage in Hades, finally over until October.

Yet you taunt us in February, a lozenge of warmth from two until five on a Wednesday afternoon, only to flit off again with the giggle of a teenage girl--so cruel, yet so delicious. It helped me remember the winter sun in the tropics, also gold and cool, burnishing the world with an amber glow before suddenly slipping away behind a man-o-war cloud.

In March there were a few false starts, one splendid stretch on a Saturday afternoon that tanned the tops of my feet, and I succumbed to the decadence completely by dozing off for an hour or so. My anxiety was gently treated by these brief embraces and promises of an extended stay soon, perhaps with your next visit. My role as the porch priestess was to keep the watch for the first hint of clear blue skies after one pm, have some urgent reading material ready, some cold and refreshing liquid tribute accessible, and position the solar seating at the correct angle to the position of the sun. I take my duties seriously.

Finally, Enchanted April, as you began to venture away from your winter digs more frequently, dragging out those last damp goodbyes with the Hades', with some hail and sideways freezing rainy days tossed in just because you can, because your games always turn out so beautifully in May, because you know we can't help ourselves that we love you, tolerate the infidelity each fall, and will always make ready the best chambers in our hearts for you. That first day-long picnic with you in May, those endless warm days in June reading poetry from the inside of my eyelids to you while I hover in the still blue air---I live for this, and you know it.

Why do I fight you? So silly of me, but there is work for me to do, tasks of living with my feet on the ground that must be done, reading and cleaning and working for that coin and paper that mean so much down here. But you don't understand, you are the ultimate source of energy, of light, what makes everything else go.

I know it. And left the tropics in spite of it, and there are rare times when I remember that day of my first summer there, in early July, when the humidity was so high, and I had no shadow standing by that giant fuschia bouganvilla. I looked around and the sky was bleached white, there was no blue, yet no clouds at all, the light was coming from right over my head and pressed down like a white-hot anvil, the only shadows were lying deep under a giant banyan grove across the white coral dirt alley. There wasn't even a breath of air or breeze, the palm fronds hung heavy and slack like sweaty hands. Nothing moved, the white heat shimmered and I could feel my bones melting. Complete seduction, I was now forever a servant to the rays of the sun and follower of the changing light.

Heliocentric

2008-05-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

Whatever I'm doing, whenever it is, if there's a sustained sunbreak, I drop my piddling little task and bolt for the outside. It's just time for winter to be finally over, and time to sit on the porch in something other than black solar-magnet clothes to ward off the chill while waiting for the blaze.

How funny is it that in Astronomy class we are studying the Sun, being tantalized by films of solar flares, boiling radiance of the photosphere, waving heat coronas in eclipse---and I get to walk home from the bus in sideways frozen rain. Brrrr.

The astonishing thing lately is that I am starting to begin to understand some of this trigonometry.
The calculator I bought has helped, and the professor is focusing more on the 'what' instead of the 'how', but neat pieces of this whole snarl of Greek letters, exponents and subsets are falling into place. Slowly, I should add, so as not to challenge the Math Gods with my arrogance.

There are all these websites to visit with animations of a full day's Sun rotation, seeing sunspot frequency, the granulations of convection cells rising to the surface and cooling (to 5 million degrees Kelvin) and sinking back under the surface to be reheated. In the presentation, there are all these cooking and stove analogies, and who knew that neutrinos came in three flavors?
During the break after the first hour of class, I saw my face in the ladies room mirror, and I looked sunburned.

This is the official Midterm week, and I just found out today I am getting an aid package for the summer term that starts the end of June. It's what I was hoping would work out, to stay at it and make up for some of all the lost time. Hopefully, there's going to be something offered that I want to take, now that I'm committed. Until the summer schedule is posted, I hover in the mysterious cloud of unknowing. Flirting with the sun.

Over the Cliff

2008-04-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

We were advised in class today that we'd taken our professor too literally, and followed his directions so unswervingly, we took it right over the cliff. The paper assignment, I mean.
And again, he threatened us that he has much much higher expectations for the one we're beginning after the midterm next week. I hope he gives us the topic parameters more than just a week ahead of time for this one, and maybe if he quit threatening us, we'd not step on the backs of his heels trying to do it exactly right.

I was surprised to hear two fellow classmates behind me on the stairs after class saying how they are having to do more research just to figure out who the main figures are in the field, because the prof keeps referencing them but never really had us learn about them, but expects us to know which guy said what, and why are we reading about baseball superstitions when we could be reading about these founders of the discipline? He has us read these assignments, but then never discusses them in class. Our textbooks don't even give an overview of the terminology, list the definitions or significant breakthroughs, or what's going on in the field now. And I had thought these two young women were so busy playing with their text messages to even think about this, so good for them, and shame on me. But it's true.

So he's going to hate my paper, now I know it for sure. Someone told me to just withdraw from the class, get an incomplete, and take it again next year with hopefully a different professor. Now that the term is almost half over, let's just get it over with and move on, is my thought. The ultimate irony is that this was going to be the focus of my major in the subject, and now I'm all put off. It just feels like a no-win all the way around.

The weather isn't helping. After that 80 degree sunny weekend almost two weeks ago, I feel like a barnacle on some barge under the Morrison Bridge. I've changed all my slide shows on my computers to tropical islands, Rocky Mountain wide blue skies, and Saharan Dunes under pure azure. My retinas need sunshine and blue above me, HELP! Saturday's supposed to be nice, high 60s and some sunshine. Reading the Odyssey on my front porch and doing laptop astronomy homework are my only plans. I got a scientific calculator today that promises fewer hours and tears, but ha ha ha, I have to learn how to use it. This is a different term entirely.

Hillary won in Pennsylvania last night, and I am so happy that she's fighting on, and not caving in to the pressure from the pundits that a national civil race war will break out if she wins the nomination by super-delegates. What kind of crap is that? How freaking racist is it to have white guys on CNN promising riots and mayhem bringing down the whole election if Hillary doesn't quit now and go home? That's like telling Obama to bug out now because if he gets the nomination by only a slim popular vote, every woman and blue collar worker will riot against African Americans and threaten the safety of the country. Like that would happen. We have two candidates that we don't want to see go all mean, to stoop to those old dog tactics of yesteryear, and I think they've held onto that position for themselves for a good long time. But the Republicans are catching a whiff of fresh air that maybe John McCain isn't so bad after all, and maybe they can win. I think Evil Rove is resting up for the summer so he can sharpen his teeth on whichever Democrat is left standing after the convention, and then this race will start to look like those ultimate cage fighters on cable---and that Democrat had better be able to suit up and let it fly. And I really want it to be Hillary, let Obama serve another term or two in the Senate, and then run and win.

Thinking about this the other day, I totally 'get' the generational thing, and why the average 25 year old is all hyped for Obama. None of these kids want to have a president that reminds them of their mom or one of their mom's friends, it's still a little weird yet. Much of my support for Hillary is for her personally, because I know her story and I know what a huge part she played in Bill's presidency, I was there and hoped she'd have her own shot at national politics afterwards. Part of it is her being a woman candidate, naturally, no shame in that for me, but I have always liked her, mostly because some of her story resembles mine I think. And I want her to go all the way, over the guardrail and fly out over the resistance and win this election, and be my president. If she weren't running, I'd most likely have the Obama buttons on, knowing he's going to need some on the job training, rattle the political science faculty of higher institutions now.

Cultural Misunderstanding

2008-04-19T19:32:00.000-07:00

Ahhhhhhh----the supreme delight and satisfaction of finishing a paper assignment. And it only took me about three hours, is a bit too long and will be tightened up tomorrow, and is absolutely true and rather funny, if I do say so myself.

My young prof asked us to write of a personal experience of having a cultural misunderstanding. My personal experience of this assignment is that it's kinda voyeristic of him to require this, but when reflecting over the last few days, I realized that most of the 18-20 yr olds in my class (and I) would have a difficult time writing of an abstract cultural misunderstanding in 3 pages. Can't really do justice to the Israelis and Palestinians in 3 pages. Or the situation with Ellis Island or First Nations. So let's keep it breezy and first hand, right? So against the advice of my pal who worked with me through this certain period of time in the 1980s, I plunged into my story of Midwest Gamine moves to South Florida and emerges from her naive realism into the diverse and much louder Southern Branch of the Gotham City Culture.

I think my pal was afraid I'd come off sounding too bitter, or bigoted, or bitchy, but I think that it's possible to write about how overwhelmed a person can feel being immersed in a totally new cultural environment, being completely ignorant of how it all works, feeling very young and inexperienced about life in general, and be honest in describing it without being any of those b-things. Plus, since it's all true, and I remember parts of it so well, there is a bit of actual recreated dialogue. The part in the bagel place changed my whole attitude about living in South Florida.

Okay, so seeing as I was the one in the minority in the BocaWorld, I get to be the one who lost her naive realistic innocence and joined the greater Gotham Culture. Naive Realism is the anthropology term for when people think that the entire world is the way that they see their own particular piece of it. That got smacked right out of me the first month I worked there. I learned a lot of things, including some bad Yiddish words I used to be able to use but have now forgotten, I learned how to give shit and got better at taking it when I had a name tag on. I also learned how to hold my own, and wished I'd have been able to learn that better in my teens instead of in my 20s and 30s.
And now I get to write about it for college credit. So so cool. And what's really funny, is that if I were even bolder and still had more of my East Coast on, I'd have included how living in Gotham Culture for so long is sometimes why the Snark Episode happened with this young prof in the first place, and also why he reacted as he did, being so West Coast as he is. But I am not so bold, at least for this graded writing assignment. Maybe sometime, since I'm staying in this department for my degree, he and I will laugh about it all.

He'll laugh reading my paper, and that's my strategy.

What's Math Got to Do With It?

2008-04-14T22:04:00.000-07:00

Uh-oh, in the weeds already. After I finished the hysterical laughing part, the 7 hour, two page homework assignment began.

There was the 90 minutes of teaching myself the astronomy software program (that we were told not to rely on to do the homework--more laughing). Then the time looking up fun facts of scientific notation, that I went ahead and did the long way instead so I could see how the math magic happens with all those zeroes and exponents. Then the drawing of the earth and imaginary planes of reference with wonky angles and imaginary horizons and trying to use common sense instead of reading Greek letters. Some tears, a bowl of cereal, and back at it.

I want the Carl Sagan Experience, damn it! Michio Kaku doesn't ruin a romantic night looking into Deep Fields by whipping out his Texas Instrument. I'm into Big Screen Astrophysics, there's people who can be hired to plot out this swarm of ant-like troll-script, don't bother me with this crap, I've got massive theory to polish in my mind.

Professors must dread people like me taking their specialty courses. This may truly wind up being a pass/fail course for me. Why not a "Science for Right-Brainers" or "Astronomy for Painters" or "Physics for Philosophers"? In perspective, the writing assignments for my other classes feel like email letters to my best friends. But I go on too long...

It was funny to be sailing along in the midst of the Iliad this morning, admiring the smoothness of the translation, thrilled to be using the same copy I used in 1979 in my Great Books class my freshman year. Which shows that a person can expand the neuro-synapses after years of dry-dock, only reading corporate manual jargonese and lighter non-fiction bestsellers, and be able to drink in the un-watered wine of classic Greek epics. Only to hit the rocks in the afternoon with astronomy. This Renaissance Woman program demands a high price of her aspirants, math entering into the process again. There just has to be a trick to this, some smoke and mirrors so I can plunge the swords into the basket and arrive at the white dove flying into the footlights. I mean, there really is, right? Silk scarves, presto-change-o, abracadabra, alacazam! Trig-o-nom-it-tree!! Whammo!

Battle cry of the Dilettante.

The Ends of the Earth

2008-04-11T19:29:00.000-07:00

I fell off, it's true.

It may have been the 12 straight episodes of Deadwood DVDs, or the complete freedom of no classes, no job, no worries. Or too many hours on the phone with Florida. This week I have been remembering Bruno and not in the mood to write anything. Last week I was reeling from how tough the Astronomy class was turning out to be.

Today I sat on the porch after school, soaked up the sunshine, and read textbooks, all the while realizing that there's been such a shift in the whole picture. A change of season brings these bubbles floating to the surface of my mind, along with wanting to do some mental spring cleaning as well.

No, going back to school has not yet become day-to-day la-de-da no big deal. It is still a huge big deal, although the walking along the park blocks marveling that I'm there is ebbing. I'm busting my ass some days just race walking to get there on time, taking the flights of stairs without gasping, not wanting to sit in a sweat through a class. I snarked off at one of my professors last week and am still cringing when I meet his eye in class, sitting silent through animated discussions like a mushroom, not contributing, now enduring every minute of a class in my major that I had been really looking forward to doing well in. Shit.

But getting thoroughly saturated in this new endeavor has definitely shut the door on any lingering vestiges of my old retail manager's life and mental space. One of my old employees is in my astronomy class and we got caught up afterwards yesterday, and it was really the first time the whole B-store episode felt done done done and dead to me, really fully behind me and in the past. Can I be allowed the slack to take a bit long to move beyond a ten+ year period of my life and identity? Stockholm Syndrome, I think it's called, otherwise known as drinking the Kool-Aid, Corporate Culture. I did go into it kicking and screaming, as I recall. But then you find yourself accepting that first promotion and going salary instead of hourly---your soul is signed over and you bitch about it every moment until you get out. The relief is overwhelming.

Of course, I'm looking for work now, and going over all of this in my head again, how do I go about this again, doing the work part without signing over the soul part? What do I know now, to do better this time? They don't need my soul, they just need me to show up and do a good job while I'm there. Whatever it is, a campus office type spot would be perfect.

Last spring about this time I had just put Betty on a plane after 12 days and was recovering by spending intense time in the garden. After getting all the dandelions, I put in the tomato starts and some herbs, weedcloth and mulch, marigolds, nasturtiums and lobelias. This spring I'm lagging behind, spending more time enjoying the season, watching Peg shoveling woodchips, cheering her on. "Isn't it beer-thirty yet?" I hollar out. "Can't slow down yet, I'm on a roll," she throws over her shoulder on her way to another load. I go back inside for another beer, I'm getting exhausted just watching her. Gotta start those pea and bean plants, I'm thinking, there's enough sun now. Zzzzzzzzzzzz

Spring Broke

2008-03-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

Spring break is begun, and I'm not sure why, but I'm grumpy. Is it because I'm already missing my regular class routine that ended over a week ago before exam week started? The lectures, the rapt absorption of every fun fact in art history, the Olmec carved heads that make me want to sculpt big things, the smug satisfaction that I felt upon realizing I knew more skeletal bones' names than I thought and that wasn't going to be tough after all---basically, the last week wasn't fun as usual, today I feel seized with the pending home invasion of Homo habilis, (a handyman installing a window) and knowing I have weeks of unmade plans to catch-up on in this tiny shrinking little week of break. Fah! (I want to watch more Deadwood DVDs and eat ice cream, but the hours tick by relentlessly.) I already hear the jingling of H. habilis' toolbox coming up the walk. It's all for the greater good, I know. Make the effort, do the dishes, vacuum, deal with the pile of magazines. Iron. Fold and put away the clean laundry from Thursday. Grrr.

It's like Betty's coming to visit all over again, I think that's what is making me crabby about this. I resent it for no reason other than I'd rather be doing something else that's fun, not necessary. Like going to get a new laptop, or seeing a movie, find a couple orchid plants on sale at Fred Meyer's, starting a new knitting project, falling into some margaritas with friends. Bah humbug.

There's no one to blame but myself. Clearly, at some level I'm too in touch with my inner 13 year old and she and I are sulking upstairs in our room, waiting until we turn 18 and our lives will really start. Those were 5 long long years, as I recall. Let's fast forward, shall we?

Someone else over the weekend remarked that an anthropology degree was a gigantic waste of time and money, what were my real plans, and that may be the real catalyst for the slump today. Either I am a complete and indebted fool, or too many people in the world have no imagination and bigger vision about handling practical reality. You can buy a $40,000 SUV and make crazy payments on that for years and that's normal today, but racking up some bills on a college education and a degree or two for about the same price is foolish. Explain this to me.

Okay, I'm going to "get real" for a few hours anyway and do some hausfrau stuff, see my favorite dog a bit, and then maybe pick up some mint chip. Betty's not coming, stand down and relax, spring break is only a week and it will be school again in no time. A smart anthropologist can create her own dream job, mull that over while vacuuming.

Portland Needs Archaeology!

2008-03-15T13:22:00.000-07:00

('Mars Needs Women!'--- I know, I thought it too)

Whilst all of Portland was returning to their work stations from lunch yesterday, they had no idea that a brain trust meeting was being held in an office at PSU that would be gathering steam to completely change the future of urban life on the Willamette as we know it!

No, not free Cirque du Soleil tickets to all.

Some students and members of the Anthropology Department were discussing a new class being offered for the Spring 2008 Term on Community Archaeology, and how this can be a great threshold for educating and encouraging the people who live in an area (Portland, for the sake of this idea) to get involved in preserving the cultural resources surrounding them. No mere coincidence that I was there, seeing as I wholeheartedly believe that this is just what Portland needs, as well as being encouraged that one of the organizers is Wendy Ann Wright, a volunteer in the office of Sam Adams. The focus of the class will be creating an annual hands-on event, that brings together local land history with ways to investigate and preserve it, and ideally get attendees interested to get involved at different levels. There can be fun things for kids and their parents to do, as well as some more involved things like foraging skills, tool-making, indigenous plants and how they were managed by native peoples, techniques of archaeological digs, the devastation of site looting, before and after depictions of how the Portland waterfront was developed---and as dedicated as we Portlanders are about our city's well-being, I think we can accomplish some good things by getting started with an event like this.

Looking out over the Portland skyline, I see all these mega-cranes, new towers under construction for new Portlanders, 4 foot trenches in the roadways exposing old brick, holes the size of a square city block 50' deep near the river, restored 19th century homes with abandoned urban lots behind them, and I see all this hidden history. No where do I feel that this developing of places should be made difficult, but there are all these lost chances to know more about our town and the brave people who wound up here long ago when this was the frontier, and the thousands of years before all that. There was a creek through there? Really? This family had an orchard there, that bend of the Willamette was an early refrigerated warehouse (no way!) that shipped fresh seafood to Denver, that site was where native peoples from all over the Pacific Northwest came and harvested obsidian. Sitting in that meeting yesterday, I knew that there are hundreds if not thousands of people here who would love to know this, especially if they're walking over it everyday or live in the neighborhood built on top of someplace so important back then. Back in my book retail days, we had one of the most heavily shopped local interest sections of any store I'd ever seen, and we had to put a display table up, so the big Photographs of Historic Portland coffee table book could be left out for browsing over, and the Portland Streetcar book, and the Portland Baseball teams book, and the Portland Gardens book, the Hill Walks of Portland, Underground Tunnels, Portland Jazz and Blues, Portland Confidential, end of the Oregon Trail. We sold hundreds of these books.

So how is this going to change life on the Willamette as we know it? I think it could, I really do, because we can create a source point for further work going forward, create a living history of a place, a block, a neighborhood, a building, a shore, a bridge, a house, a street, and ultimately, a community. It's fascinating to hear the story of a place you know, who doesn't like a good true story?

Serious Deja-vu

2008-03-14T19:33:00.000-07:00

These moments keep happening to me, but I have learned to just roll with it, and not try to explain it anymore, the weird looks from people started to get to me.

Again today, standing talking to someone, great conversation, making meaningful connections with new people, and that almost-creepy wave came over me from behind my head and washed out past us to sweep up the entire roomful of people, to splash up along the walls then out the doorway. This has so already happened to me, right here right now, with this person, with that feeble light from the grown-over window, the mid-century furniture, I know what that person is going to say next---bang, there it is, the other person has to go, I say my line, we laugh...

When I get home, I write my best friend that a current of low resistance is happening right now, that a step in this certain direction is the right step for me, there's no fighting against anything, whatever "the Flow" is for an individual, I seem to be in mine. My friend has always been great at surfing that momentum in her own life, willing to work hard, but knowing when to ride a high tide. For many years, I was not knowing how to do that, although she's been a great friend who's always leading by example. And she's humble about it, too. The magnitude of the pure relief I experience when looking at today versus last year or last decade, flabbergasts me. She laughs when I tell her; "That's the pay-off for all that thrashing around back then girlfriend!" she cackles. Like a spooky reflection, I remember hanging out together by her fireplace at her old place in Florida, a few beers gone and more in the fridge, and we wove out our visions for the Good Life in our futures. She was going back West, New Mexico or Colorado, and she wanted horses and two kids, Sam Elliott in the saddle and the mountains on the edge of her acres. She was going to let her hair fly in the dry wind and get all that South Florida humidity out of her system and her books. Plant a million bulbs and some trees, and grow herbs on her front porch, and have about three dogs.

We were all so much more Florida then, though we fought against it. Not in the right element.

I wanted to have a funky artsy place in an old farmhouse or bungalow with a big porch, some cats, room for all my books yet walls for the artwork, ground to get some tomatoes, herbs and flowers going, windchimes and suncatchers, music and light, writing and school, no suburban ambitions or homeowners' associations, cool neighbors and be either in Provence or Northern California probably, somewhere with ocean, mountains, woods, and decent coffeehouses and art film theaters.

Our enchantments must have flown up that chimney and started the winds of change to blow. Other than the Sam Elliott part, she's pretty much right where she saw herself back then, including her nephew being her other kid in the house. Slick maneuvering, there. And it didn't even take her ten years to do it all. Or me, either, and I can still afford Portland.

So the Deja-vu thing is not too scary to me. It's usually always a good re-run. Foreshadowing or looking back, it's the same loop, I get it now.

Finals

2008-03-13T22:17:00.000-07:00

My last week of classes for the Winter 2008 term have been this week---finished already. Crazy.
One more archaeology class Friday, then exams Tuesday,Wednesday, Thursday.

Then let Spring Break begin!

Not that I need a break, I'm still all fired up and being a goof about it all. Still.
As the week went by, more and more of the syllabi were getting shortened, running out of term, less to have to cover for the finals. Then today, one prof said "I've decided the exam will not be cumulative, just cover what we've done since the mid-term." The class of 90-something students broke out into rowdy applause. She smiled in relief and her shoulders fell about a foot from around her ears. She doesn't have a TA this term---poor soul.

Next term looks bright, too. The last Intro Anthropology class, the last PSU-peculiar "university studies cluster course" requirement (I picked Medieval Studies), and Roman History. However, this class may or may not work out, the 10-minute break between classes to get from one building to the other won't be enough time to get 5 blocks and at least four stories up from the Engineering Building to central campus Cramer Hall. What's a history class doing at the Engineering Building? Is this class heavily chosen by engineering students or something? I'd need a golf cart to do that sprint, so I may have to change it out if they don't reassign it to a closer building. The Roman part of my art history class was my favorite section, so I want to know all about Rome now. Everything. This happens to me all the time. You should see all the books I have on Egypt...

It's fun to read the texts and go over the notes and feel like you know this stuff, no need to cram. The idea I heard about is that your short-term memory files things you learn straight into your mid-to-long-term memory if you study, then take a nap or call it a night and go to bed. So while I'm dreaming about Bruce Campbell as a trapeze artist like Errol Flynn in a technicolor movie in my brain theater complete with a glass harmonica orchestra playing circus tunes, all that biological anthropology and paleoanthropology material is becoming part of my mental office studio (this happened). There it will be, all that information, forever close to the tip of my tongue to horrify and bore my friends, "Hey, that reminds me of this group of hominids who walked across an ash field---wait, don't go, okay I'll stop."

Now that Garden Season is here, prepping the Garden anyway, it will serve as the great balancer of brain and body. Being in the dirt releases a trip-switch in my head, and I work out all kinds of things while weeding, planting, gathering marigold seeds, or ripping out last year's wintered-over stems and stalks. What could be wiser than reading textbooks while enjoying porch time and the tomato starts?

All is well.

Everyday Anthropology

2008-03-07T19:00:00.001-08:00

Here's a perfect example of the essential usefulness of knowing some anthropology...

Setting: backyard hot tub at dusk, sneaking in while neighbor is out of town.

Cast: half-buzzed sneaky neighbor in hot tub; one resident of house of said hot tub;

Scene: Roaring hot tub jets, growing twilight, just as a chilly sprinkle starts, house resident tentatively approaches occupied hot tub, saying name of sneaky neighbor repeatedly so as not to startle her. Finally she hears him---

Sneak: He-e-e-y, neighbor! Wow, hope it's okay, I called---

Resident: I didn't want to scare you, it's cool, did it warm up yet?

S: Yeah, it's gettin' there, almost 100 now.

R: Mind if I join you? (climbs in, resets jets, louder roaring and churning)

S: Nope, just relaxing after a long week of classes, I brought a beer, TGIF! (they laugh)

S & R don't really know each other well, they each know the owner of the house pretty well, the one who isn't there. A few moments of loud but awkward silence. They discuss Portland, other places they each used to live, until suddenly---

R: Like that place in New England, where they found that ancient place with the rocks and the coins---

S: ---and the petroglyphs---

R: Right! Like before Columbus and the Vikings!

S: I saw that show on the National Geographic channel where they think it may have been the ancient Phoenicians or even post-ice age Europeans that followed the melting ice shield to North America---

R: Yeah, I saw that, and the native peoples had European DNA before North America was colonized---

S: Like Kenniwick Man had Altaic or Ainu DNA, not recent DNA from more recent peoples in the Pacific Northwest----

R: So what about the Nazca Lines? I took one of those classes where the teacher said none of any of it was true---

S: Yeah, 'The Pseudo-sciences' myth-busting thing, like 'NO, the Aliens did NOT build the pyramids!'

R: Exactly!

R & S go on, getting redder and redder in the face in the 106 degree water for another 30 minutes.

S: (feeling faint) I think I have to get out---I'm poached. (sloshes out, grabs towel)

R: Yeah, me too, right after you. (climbs out, covers hot tub)

They stand there steaming in the dim evening, bi-pedal lobsters:

S: Great chat!

R: Yeah, good soak, this is easy to get used to.

S: I owe _____ a case of beer, for all the kind lending of the hot tub goodness. (stops herself from launching into the brewing history of the Fertile Crescent peoples)

They each drip towards their respective front doors. S drinks a large glass of water, once again grateful for the ever-readiness of Anthropological knowledge to save the day and gloss-over faux pas of all kinds, remedy social situations, and claim common interests to make new friends. S frantically searches her freezer for an ice pack, to avoid the popping of the top of her head.

curtain

NOT Waiting to Exhale

2008-03-05T13:03:00.000-08:00

After some comfort remedies of panang curry and strawberry Haagen Dazs last night, I bravely flipped back over to CNN at 10 and saw the happy almost-sweep Hillary made of Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island.

This grrrrrl starts YELLIN' at the television set----so happy, so happy, so happy. Hillary looked so happy delivering her speech, and as much as the pundits like to slam her for tearing up, she seemed truly humbled at the very very end of her speech. Her voice caught, that her supporters surged like almost a force of nature to keep her from going down in flames last night. Believe me, this woman may be a seasoned politician, but she was moved and understands that she can't do this all by her self-sufficient self. But I've been a fan for almost 20 years, she and I are both feminists of the second wave who don't apologize for it, and now in our middle age, girls grow up being able to almost take it for granted that they can run for office and not just be the "coffee girl".
This is a huge stride, just as huge as the civil rights stride that makes Barack Obama the other "this is so cool right now!!" candidate. My friend's 13 year old actually asked her mom to tell her about the 60's so she could understand better all the references to it culturally and politically, and she was truly astounded at what the status quo had been. These are the moments that humble me. 'Cause I was a little kid then and remember the snarling white faces live on black and white TV, and heard people say out loud the most horrible things when Martin Luther King was killed, and saw my friends' moms ostracized and belittled for going to work and being one of those "god-damned women's libbers". I used to tell my parents that I was born a liberated woman, and it pissed them off. But it's true, and makes me want to holler at my television today when I see these bitter nasty pseudo-preachers slam Hillary Clinton because they are still feeling insulted that she "didn't stay home and bake cookies" but became an attorney and worked on the Watergate hearings--didn't know her place was in the home and to stay there. And shut up.
That's why I want to see her as Madame President. Like Benazir Bhutto, or Chancellor Angela Merkel, even Thatcher or Meir or Indira Gandhi, it's not like Hillary would be the first and only one ever. Because I know she can do it. No one could have a better kitchen cabinet than hers. And that's not a lame joke, FDR had one, too.
I'm not anti-Obama. If it were he and anyone else running, that sticker on my car would say "Obama '08". It could yet, who can say today who clinches the nomination? The two people I was watching CNN with last night both said they wished Michelle Obama was running instead of her husband. That too may come to pass. She's a high-power attorney. She doesn't stay home and bake cookies all day. That is how far we've all come (thank god) in the last 40 years, that we can know that and it is not an attempt at humor. It is where we are today.

So so happy about that.

You'd Think It's November

2008-03-04T15:57:00.000-08:00

Can a person hold their breath for an entire day in primary season?

All the way home on the bus today, I'm thinking, "Turn on CNN and see how the voting is going," and then the trap door drops out and I hear, "Don't put yourself through this, it seems even Democrats want to be preached to, he'll hire all her best wonks to do what he doesn't know how to anyway, start moving on."

I'm watching Wolf Blitzer with the sound on really low.

This summer, when McCain wasn't doing so well, I thought of how I had told my co-workers 2 years ago that McCain would win in 2008, really not much doubt about it in my mind. I was amazed his campaign seemed to be on life-support and Romney was doing his best SNL Reagan impersonation and actually being taken fairly seriously. I knew Giuliani was way too New York for everyone but South Floridians and their kids who still live in New York and New Jersey.

So I was really wrong about Barack Obama. Man oh man, was I ever. He's hip, he's cool, he can do the hanging loose with everybody thing, he's never said anything while his wife was running for president that is still being bitterly held against him over 20 years later (the staying home and making cookies thing) and he can even admit to doing drugs and not be held to an executive office standard. Wow, who'd have thought it? The right wingers hate him less because he's a guy, and he hasn't done anything yet that they can nail him about.

So even though I was right that McCain is the Republican nominee, and the least of all Republican evils, he just may loose to Obama. And it hit me the other night seeing Barack on TV, that he seems kind of familiar, and I don't mean the MLK oratory style. When he's standing there just talking, and walking back and forth on a stage, it finally hit me who it was: Bill Clinton.
And then I realized that's why he might win, McCain will seem like the first George Bush, and Obama will seem like the younger, new generation, hipper (the ladies like 'im) fresh from state government Bill Clinton. 'Cause we all know that if Bill and Hillary ran against each other for office, who would win.

It's so great that we are having such an unusually exciting election season, and one of those rare changing of the guard thresholds we see about every 20 years or so, but this week I'm experiencing that weird anxiety of this suspense. My hopes were riding so high, she was the front-runner all this time, and it's hard to see her so desperately hanging in there. I had already thoroughly started imagining her first term in office, maybe Barack could be Attorney General or something juicy like that. Now...I'm just feeling so uneasy about it all. He is being naive about global protocol, and will hire on a slew of Bill's crew to help him get on his feet, but if anyone should be leading Bill's crew, it should be Hillary who helped put it together in the first place. It reminds me of the female executive who trains the young male hotshot, who then replaces her in the corner office. The middle-aged woman issue is this--- She isn't a woman most men want to have sex with, and she reminds men under 40 of their moms and who wants your mom for president, right? But if she's too sexy, that's not good, either. Geena Davis had good presidential charisma.

This is nuts. I'm going to shut it off until at least 8pm, another 4 hours away. With all of my term paper absorption over the weekend, there is all that housework I didn't do. Someone remind me to never change paper topics a mere 10 days before the due date ever again.

I'm Stalling

2008-03-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

Or rather, I'm getting warmed up for the composing of the term paper.

sigh

Chicago Manual of Style, I detest thee. Already, I'm thinking, "Isn't there software for this crap?" I want to spend time on the meat and potatoes of this project, not the alignment of the grains of salt. There is software for this, and all the nagging ninny voices warn the slacking paperer not to rely on them to be accurate or appropriate for their project. Details. Hate them.

And I did put it off until the last three days, didn't I? The research and sourcing was done, the creating of the illustration page was done, and somehow Friday and Saturday got away from me. So now it's today and tomorrow (and tomorrow night) and that's it. Lesson learned. Dumb-ass.

So, what about a 30 minute hot tub to relax? (no)
What about taking the bassett hound on a afternoon walk before her people arrive home? (later)
Watering plants? (no)
Washing a few dishes? A load of laundry? (no)
Okay, a hot shower and a fresh pot of coffee? (hmmm, alright)

Cue up classical 89.9, unwrap that block of French shea butter soap from New Seasons, hit the 'brew' button----then get to work.

Great, now the sun is coming out....

Leap Day

2008-02-29T13:04:00.000-08:00

Back in the Ann Arbor days, the early 80s, when I was doing a lot more writing, I composed another front stoop poem, on a strangely warm, sunny day at the end of February. The house on Bath Street was perched next to a woody ravine on a dead end street, surrounded by bungalows with rampant herb gardens. Purple sage can survive a cold Michigan winter, shrinking under the snow and waiting for spring. I sat on the listing plank steps with my face to the sun, and waited for the clear sign of what to chose next for my life; go to Florida and a new life, or stay here and find another job. Re-reading the poem, I knew I had already made up my mind, I was going to go, and I'd never sit in the warm sunshine in late February on these steps again.

Waves of that day came back to me this morning, walking downtown and seeing clumps of drowsy purple sage next to gray lavender and blooming rosemary in a large planter. What was a complete anomaly in Michigan, is a normal winter's day here, and I much prefer it this way. I can sit on my stony concrete steps with my face in the sun in late February in this place, on these steps, and it all comes washing back. That I am finally back in school, dealing with the Biggest Incomplete of my entire life, but outwardly doing much of what I was doing back then in Ann Arbor, is kinda funny. Almost like the last 22 years didn't happen. More and more, it even feels that way.

To some, this may look like Being Stuck. As in, "Ma'am, it's done already, move on, get over it, drop the baggage!"

And I reply, "That's what I tried to do those 22 years." I did the Job Thing, the 'My Beautiful Career' Thing, the 'Serious Adult Relationship' Thing, the Survival Strategy Thing, and even the Not-Caring Thing. Years and years spent in the wilderness. One or two major choices I may have done differently, looking back, but if presented with the same circumstances, my path would probably look much the same. I mean, living in a condo on Highland Beach, Atlantic Coast South Florida for free for eight months at 24 years old---who is going to say, "Uh, no thanks, really, I much prefer my unheated room in a run-down house with flaky roommates in a Michigan winter, a chronic respiratory illness and being unemployed,"?

Today was the first time since that last day at the B-store that I walked past my old workplace downtown. It felt weird. Past the bank where I spent so much time each weekday afternoon waiting to make a bag of deposits, past the parked FedEx truck of my old driver, with a ticket on it (as usual). Past the mall, past the Russian 'kofe' place, smelling the Mexican lunch place; how many hundreds of times did I make that walk, but veer left to the wall of glass doors? Today, I was smiling and just kept walking past, towards the river, towards home in the middle of the workday with my class notes in my book bag. No big deal, I know, but for a fraction of a second I was time traveling, 22 years, then 13 months, but also into the near-future. Because Portland is the place to navigate from, for me, and no condo in a warm place could change my mind. PSU has no clue what mad power it has to change the stream of Deep Time.

Casting a Spring Spell

2008-02-27T13:38:00.000-08:00

Daphne, violets and trilliums. Crocuses, narcissus, daffodils and camellias.

Standing in the full sunshine, facing south in a sheltered spot, it feels like June. Then, step into the breeze that's wafting all that perfume towards you, and it's a gentle mid-50s, your black t-shirt soaking up enough warmth to keep you perfectly comfortable sitting out in front of Stumptown Cafe on Division this afternoon. Or Common Grounds, or Fireside, or Javaman---or your own sidewalk stoop. I won't wave at you, I don't want to disturb the vibe we're each riding, I know what listening to ancient French court music in the sun while inhaling fresh violets does to me, I can imagine how amazing your trip is right now. You still have the laptop open before you, but your gaze is a million light years away.

You can stop time, for a little while anyway, by taking a deep breath and releasing it like an evaporating shadow, and disappear along with it. Then just pay attention to all the wonder flowing along around you, over you, through you like a smooth rock in a strong river. Like the faint mandolin floating from somewhere, the violets again, the bus and the dog barking, the bell on the cafe door, your coffee keeping your palm warm, the sun through your eyelids, a crumb of that scone on your lip melting yum, skateboarder growling past, that guy must be playing mandolin on his porch----

Hours can pass this way in clock time, but you've just enjoyed a lozenge of eternity that will remain in your neuron memory the remainder of your life. Sometimes the moment feels like an illuminated spiders web humming, or cool damp and comforting beach sand when the waves rush out again. Pick your talisman, they're your treasures.

Repeat often, as necessary, wherever, whenever you are

Memoirs of a Slacker

2008-02-24T13:22:00.000-08:00

A strange kind of weekend off, for a student person. The big lead-up to my Friday morning exam was all consuming this past week, cramming, making study-guide outlines, craving that "A". By 11:10am Friday, I was free, and felt just like I did after driving away from Pioneer Place Mall for the last time with my car loaded and no 'God' key on my keyring anymore, just over a year ago.

The sun was even out, it was about 50 degrees, and I had nothing pressing at all. My term paper wasn't due for two weeks yet. I stopped by FedExKinkos and got the artwork for it printed in color from my flash drive, and it wasn't even noon yet. what to do, what to do, what to do?

Caught the bus home, bought some beer, walked Miss Daisy Bassett, and basically goofed off.
It is a weird feeling, to be a "grown-up" and know in your head what you should be doing, or could be doing, and still just slack like you were born to be one, because nothing is a crisis right at the moment. I like this.

So, being the adult, I am spending a part of this afternoon being responsible, doing laundry, reading over my art history research notes for that paper, running over to New Seasons for a couple of things, but I may just be getting better at time management after all. Or getting better at power-slacking; like power-napping, in the right amount at the right time, I feel like I'm getting away with something. Or taking art classes, leaving the library with a $200 book on the history of still-lifes, and it was okay to do that, too.

It all sounds so silly, I know, but I just thought all of this was going to be so much harder than it is, and I had that idea since I began thinking about going back to school in 1986, 5 years after I had had to quit. The cost, the job-juggling, the shitty local Florida college, the re-locating to one I would want to attend, the relationship, the commute, the age difference, the unmet expectations, the Magic Golden Perfect Job at the end of the stage when I got my diploma, the debt to repay, yadda yadda yadda. It was all too much. Abandon ship! Just get a job and work your way to some mid-level with some insurance and make Life be about something else. Don't listen to that little voice going on and on about dreams and being real, get real about paying the bills instead.

Also, now is just the right time, it came together without the moving of Heaven and Earth effort it would have required before. There was some noticeable remorse when I was sitting in that room of my peers at the Anthropology Dept. lecture a few weeks ago---they have their Masters and PhDs already, shit, I'm still just an undergrad---and it did feel crappy. It really did.
But I realized I'm not interested in excavating all my regrets and reasons, it would take a long time and just make me feel worse, so don't do it. Keep moving--- advice I gave friends and employees for tough times, just keep going forward. Take naps---my other bit of advice. Put on some great music and something will surface. Lay in some snack-age, frosty bevs, and chill. Take a long brisk walk, come home to a hot shower, then snooze for 20 minutes. Then---get back to your task. Or not. slacker

The Unswept Floor

2008-02-19T23:11:00.001-08:00

When the 10' high image flashed up on the white screen at the front of the lecture hall, I experienced a moment of utter delight and the thrill of seeing why Art is so crucial to education.

This is a mosaic on the floor of a Roman villa, in what was a sumptuous dining area with reclining couches for feasting, and this charming floor to toss your lobster shells, peacock bones, sea urchin spiny shells, bruised olives, lemon rinds, etc. So it all would blend in with the tromp l'oeil cast-offs already tiled with faint dimensional shadowing beneath your chaise. Don't hit the mouse.

So I think at least 50 of my cohorts in the ancient art history class are ditching their previously researched research topic for something as fun as this. We'll all say the same thing 50 different ways, our poor professor. She'll regret slipping this slide into the lecture, it wasn't in the textbook.

So maybe some more art history classes for me are in store, I am really enjoying this one, and there are specialized classes spending an entire term on one era or cultural movement, not just a week like this Intro class. Romanesque, Ancient Near East, Ancient Asian, Islamic, Renaissance architecture...if I only have 54 more credits to fulfill my major, I'm going to need some electives.
Honestly, I knew I'd like this class, but I didn't know it would be this much fun. Mosaic artists do their modern version of this, with RedBull cans, cigarette butts, gum, lipstick, underwear, dust bunnies, Cheetos---the average dorm room floor. Mine would be books, magazines, cat toys, recycling in the corner, bus tickets, shoes and bookbags. This type of art is basically a snapshot of popular culture of the time---Roman villa to PSU dorm floor. Full circle.

Sunbreak Photographs

2008-02-15T19:20:00.000-08:00

Wow---

Is this a great town, or what?

I took this from a bus roaring over the Morrison Bridge this afternoon, what an amazing view!

All the rain we had, I knew that the mosses would be peak with the sun sneaking out now and then, so I was disturbing the homeowners hanging out on a Friday afternoon, "Who is that taking pictures in our front yard?" But look at those pussywillow shots, can you stand it? Got the curly willow at Kath & Harv's, and the extreme plush velvet at Matt & Emily's. They weren't home.

Six-and-a-half weeks

2008-02-14T18:06:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here with the Spring term course schedule already.

This is week 6 of the Winter term, half over, midterms behind me, I shoulder the bookbag up and down the hills filled with library books loaned to me from all over Oregon about the ancient Hittite Empire, the Research Paper to write, then only the Final Exams ahead.
Afterwards, the 10 days off before Spring term starts on March 31st.

What do I need to do to retrieve my photographic memory of the first lap of my schooling? Only needed to read something twice, and I not only could remember it for exams, but could visualize it on the page. Before anyone calls out the AGE card, I think that the working world had it's own level of memorization requirements, as in unpacking 150 cases of books and remembering that in the flurry of sorting them into storage bins whether the third Spiderwick book came in and whether it was in paperback or hardcover. And how far back in the bin you stacked it.
So my memory skills were merely redirected to assist me as a customer serving boss instead of a student (or singer of rock lyrics).

Six weeks in, and my stair-taking is less embarrassing, I know which of the busses running through the fare-free zone stops have a drop-off stop at PSU (Portland, she rains) and which cross-over bridges between buildings are enclosed so I don't have to passively smoke a cigarette or two on my way to Neuberger Hall. If only there was one to the library...

I love that library. It has that mid-century smell that I remember from before the digital age and it comforts me when browsing through the stacks and finding an irresistible book on 1930's Mandarin Chinese poetry in translation, or repaired bindings on 100 year old books so they can still be read. Libraries are treasuries, attracting serious students, snoozers, and today a table of fully chadored young women playing with their cell phones and giggling when a young man sat down at their table. BTW, the Hittite books are fascinating, how am I going to narrow down which works of art to compare for the paper? I love these kind of dilemmas.

But I need a new laptop, clearly the 2003 Sony is so slow and noisy and almost 9lbs, it's not going to be hanging off my shoulder on the bus and throwing out the other side of my lower back. There have been days when I've come into a lecture hall and the whole back half of the room is wall-to-wall upright laptops, and the pitter-patter of Apple keystrokes has become just as integral to the lecture as the whir of the slide projector over my head. Free wi-fi access is everywhere on campus, so I could work on my online research at the table by the window with my hot organic coffee gripped in my hand, then speed off to my next class. I get a student discount if I get one through the online Apple Education store, or I can check Best Buy, but being able to carry around my files and add to them while on campus will really come in handy. As Steven would say,"Well, some bitches better get a job!" I'd rather get a grant, and shake some Apples loose from the money tree. Some bitches get wicked crafty...

My neighbor John was snickering at me today, he's a retired teacher, that I'm just so happy to be doing what I'm doing, loaded down with books late in the afternoon, coming home from the bus. Sometimes I feel seven years old again, can't wait to break open the books after class and mentally run like hell. There is nothing else in the world I'd rather be doing.

Archaeology is a Contact Sport

2008-02-08T14:50:00.000-08:00

Who knew? I thought it would be a bunch of wonks, Star Wars alumni, Tolkien freaks, time travelers, anti-Indiana Joneses, Outcasts of the Curious Anachronism Society and RenFest drop outs. Well shame on me, although I'm a tad disappointed to see that they seem to look alot like me, except for the manly men with earnest expressions and one or two with Merlin beards. At least here in downtown Portland, it isn't a Summer of '69 reunion either attending the Anthropology Department's "First Thursday" Lecture event at 4pm yesterday afternoon. Of course I was going to go, and it has nothing to do with the extra credit essay, because the topic was establishing a Cultural Resources Preservation Program for the City of Portland, to enforce the national, state, county and municipal historic sites' laws as well as bringing it to a higher profile in the community.

Honestly, I was stunned. You mean Portland doesn't have this already? I thought. You've got to be kidding me.

The presenter was Wendy Ann Wright, a PSU student in the Anthropology department, a Powells Books alumna, mom, and passionate member of Sam Adams' staff at City Hall. OMG!!
What better person to catalyze this idea in the city, and she had a great slide presentation of the research she's done in other cities nationally, to find models that are community-based and effective already. Again, I sat there looking at her slides of St. Mary's Academy Wall demolition that she may as well have downloaded from my blog, as well as hurried excavations of privies and Chinese cemetery graves with a row of bulldozers and backhoes hovering in the background.

Portland doesn't have this in place already? I can't believe this! When she concluded, my hand shot up. "Hi, I'm really uninformed about the whole City permitting process, but everyday I see the progress of the building project at the base of the Hawthorne Bridge, and they're already 50 feet down---before the contractor started digging, he had to find out about gas lines, water lines,
how strong the soil barrier is between the hole and the river---I would think historic maps of municipal locations are available to check this just like the gas and water companies survey and OK going ahead with excavating, right? Couldn't a City of Portland Archaeologist or Historic Site Manager Office be layered in here at this point so at least within the city limits sites aren't just plowed up?"

Well, she mentioned the standard fire maps, and archived city maps, but no, there isn't really anything like this in Portland at this time, it would be a budget issue certainly.

An older gentleman stood up. He was concerned that there was a punitive attitude coming off of archaeologists and site preservationists that would actually have the opposite effect of discouraging people from coming forward with asking for site assistance if an artifact showed up in a shovel of dirt or their basement bricks collapse and there's old bootlegger paraphrenalia falling onto the floor. Why couldn't the utilities and industrial corporations be asked to underwrite some of these efforts and also cooperate with the city in recovering some of their own industrial history and be seen as caring about the community preservation movement instead of being told to absorb the time and costs of investigating sites all over the city? He started out seeming a bit hostile to Wendy's anti-looting attitude that makes all collectors and antique markets suspect, but she was able to agree with him and turn his question into an approach almost everyone could agree with. She said there was an African American Art exhibit that Sam Adams' office was involved in that had had an antique bottle collector involved, but he pulled out after getting some flack from the archaeologists in town about his collection being "looted", which in strict trade terminology means removed from its historical context (or dump pit). It is a comment on we everyday townsfolk that most of us need to be educated that saving a cloudy antique bottle (it's blue and says 'poison', cool!!) from your backyard compost pile of 103 years ago constitutes "looting". But it is. Strictly speaking. Even if you own the property.

This is where the contact sport part comes in.

Needless to say, in Wendy's research to find a working preservation model that has widespread and cooperative community involvement, she finds that there are plenty of struggles with individuals' and commercial property rights when it comes to designating something 'historic' or a 'cultural resource' , and different cities have varying levels of success with this issue. She mentioned Alexandria, VA and Vancouver, WA as two cities with viable programs and great community involvement and support. These agencies get the kids involved with introductions to archaeology with a "kids dig"; artifact copies that the kids get to use methods of excavation to "find" and analyze. Also, many Native American Nations are active in community awareness and education to preserve sites and ways of life, often coordinating with municipal and county agencies to work with the public and commercial interests. Often, she said, there are laws in place already that are poorly enforced or thought of as arcane, and educating officials about these laws would be a place to start with raising preservation with the public.

There's already a faint sound in my head, "You should do this, you love Portland so much, what a great project this would be to get involved with and help launch!" I haven't had a huge ambition in a few months, it's about time to have a new one, isn't it? Halfway through my first term, after 25+ years out of school, and already I'm the department expert in my own delusional brain. Too funny, isn't it? And the fact that these "First Thursday" Anthropology lecture attendees are about my age, already have my interests, and go to a pub afterwards to eat and drink and talk shop would be the perfect arm-twister to get me to keep going. And earning extra credit. And blogging about it. Until maybe I finally dive in and present Sam Adams with a plan.

Politics and Real Life

2008-02-06T15:25:00.000-08:00

I have a mid-term tomorrow, so this will be short.

My dear friend Jolie took her 13 year old daughter out of school last week to go to a political rally at Denver University, knowing the experience of 'politics as rock concert' would have a lasting impression on her youngin', and here she is. (they grow up so fast)

She shook Bill's hand, and took pictures of him going through the reception line. Jolie was so proud, and happy to be the shining blue light in her red state neighborhood, and that her daughter got the political bug of how important this election is in her lifetime, and to be aware and awake for it while it's happening. Talk about handing the torch to the next generation, Ted Kennedy's got nothing on this one.

I stayed home from an Anthropology Department after school lecture on 'Myth-busting CSI Forensics' to watch the Clinton-Obama debate last Thursday live on CNN, and found out the next day that the lecture was packed, and the kids in class didn't even know there was a debate or who was debating or that only two Democrats were left in the race. I already knew that no one under 25 listens to the radio anymore, which guarantees the final death rattle of neo-Cratzies talk radio shows, but other than Obama buzz online, the GenYers don't watch news or CNN either. No newspapers, no radio, no landline telephones, no tv news---we're undergoing a complete media revolution and over 40 people don't know it yet. The campaigns who 'get it' will lead the way to the political future and everyone else will be wondering what just ran them over.

I'm watching the bug-eyed furious conservative 'faith' party implode because a reasonable man who wants to work with Democrats will win the nomination, which is another example of how crazy this 'moral majority' crap is and that it's finally drawing to a close in the light of reason. This new generation who loves Obama won't fall for this line of narrow exclusionist thinking, Rushbaugh can fade away with Cheney and the rest of the Nixon/Reagan interns and we can get on with leading our country into the future. It's a nicely odd feeling when I can choose between a black candidate, a woman candidate and a white republican I respect in a presidential election, and they all have an absolute chance of winning, AND will all work together after the election. I have hope again.

St. Mary's Wall

2008-01-29T19:04:00.000-08:00

Back to the wall saga----

I didn't have my camera with me today, plus it was a snotty rain in the afternoon, almost freezing and never getting beyond about 7am bright. I'll bring it along tomorrow, but the scoop today is that they have left the huge deciduous (oak) tree in the center of the lot, while the large pine is gone, leaving a raw stump about 20ft in the air. Yeesch! The cracked corner is knocked down to the height of a knee-wall and it continues at that height along to where the quaint arched gateway cuts through. Above one gateway is a carved stone arch that says "St. Mary's Academy" in a gothic Victorian script, above a gray slat door, and the teardown stops there on the side facing East. Packed earth berms slope away from the edge of the wall up to the level of the carpark, covered with gray plastic membrane and sandbags, keeping the dirt solid and dry. The old flagstone knee-wall turns the corner and heads west up the hill for about 30 or 40 ft, until the second arched gateway filled with a gray slat door. The original height and capstoned wall continues to the corner as if nothing is happening down the hill. The little ferns and mosses are all still soaking up the rains and thriving, green as glow worms on the flagstones.

Grief

2008-01-28T13:35:00.000-08:00

My favorite dog is leaving the planet and my heart is breaking. There's nothing I can do except hug on him, pet and scratch him, give him some yogurt and doggie cookies, push the water dish over, and help him up if he wants to go outside. Nothing but everything I can to help him and give him love and touch.

You're never ready, you just aren't, unless you're good at keeping your heart in an insulated place far away from where it's supposed to be. I'm no good at that with animals, and even though he's been sliding in that direction for a while, it was still a shock to see it so baldly and with no other meaning than this. I'm tired of saying goodbye to animals, but I can't quit loving them, there's no other way than to love the hell out of them, so a fresh heartbreak, another raw grief, and time to say goodnight again. I know what unconditional love is because I've learned it this way, over and again, the noble animal souls who leave me behind blessed with their unconditional acceptance and love for me. There's no 'right' way to do grief, you just shoulder into it and keep breathing. Hugging other animals is a fine solace.

Today's Teardown

2008-01-23T12:59:00.001-08:00

As pleased as I was to see the wall mostly still standing, I was then horrified to see what they were doing today to the huge trees on the lot. It seems they're removing the back fill that was put in at least 40 years ago to create a parking lot (by the size of the trees) and maybe leaving the wall intact? The backhoe operator is very delicate when digging near the wall facade, and is working on taking out the big slabs of asphalt and pounding them into smaller chunks that can be scooped up with a bulldozer. He takes out a chunk of the old concrete that's behind the flagstone with the vest guy guiding him, then he comes back for the soil. None of the rest of the wall is being disturbed (today) but since they're taking out the trees, maybe the wall is part of the preservation of whatever the future use the site will have.

This is what's on the other side of the street, facing the moss wall, the modern alternative.
Say it ain't so.

I know, why do I care, right? I don't work or live there, it didn't belong to my family or anything, so who cares? This wall is an historic part of the whole St. Mary's Academy & Church complex and is at least 100 years old, if not 175, and there's no replicating it if it's torn down. I mean, look at this gray nothingness---

The moss, the placement of each stone by human hands and mortared generously, the quality that has lasted this long, that's what I value in my urban surroundings, why I love Portland so much. If it's gone in a few weeks, someone noticed it happening, and took some last pictures of the beautiful stonework and inner-city mid-winter greenness of it. It's a living wall, it really is.

It's Gone Now

2008-01-22T19:29:00.001-08:00

This morning I went by the wall and activity on the block had picked up noticeably, now a trailer with a backhoe was being unloaded above the corner here. I had to rush to my 10am Bio Anthropology class, and hoped for the best.

After my last class let out, after 2, I walked down the hill with the sunshine on my back and stopped behind the flagger on the corner and just took it all in: this corner was gone. The backhoe was directly above where the ledge had been, piles of the flagstone heaped next to the equipment, retaining walls of crumbling concrete falling away towards the street, stony earth being scooped out and away into a dump truck. What will be?

Are they shoring this corner up to preserve the wall? Or is this antique remnant of St. Mary Academy's playground garden being replaced with the battleship gray concrete panels found across the street? With no moss whatsoever. I'm going to hope for the best, shore it up, re-pour the retaining wall behind it, then put the stones back. The moss will take a few years, but I have a buttermilk recipe that can accelerate the re-colonization. I know what the odds are, but it can be fixed, just that iffy, cracked and bowed out corner.

Ay, Carumba!

2008-01-19T10:25:00.000-08:00

...I can't put in the Spanish inverted exclamation point, but it's implied, okay?

Semana Numero Dos is now history, and I have a legal holiday long weekend to spend like a student. 'Cause that's what I am! I had some beer, and watched the last episode of my telenovela "Amar sin Limites" last night, with every woman of child-bearing age either about to pop or holding a newborn, the single women having weddings, and the people over 50 holding their grandchildren and smiling. And the evil characters living a life of shame or dead, the bad always get punished, and forgiven before they die. Now I'm down to only one show, 9pm on Univision, the costume epic of colonial Mexico, with amazing estates, horses and carriages, gowns and pirate attire, aging conquistadores and their willful children...Pasion. Pretty much sums it up, really.

School so far is amazing, I'm keeping up on the reading, and I had a chance to meet with one of my professors who is the head of the archaeology dept. for 30 minutes of course advising, she was very helpful. She was trying to encourage me to take the two statistics classes, but honestly, it's not likely, not when there's two alternatives in the Linguistics dept. that have a lot more interest to me. Math? NOW? I shudder to think. Aren't there Excel programs to crunch those numbers by now? We were seeing slides of her and her team in the 80s excavating a site in eastern Washington, and they still had to use survey equipment and plumb lines from 500 ft away. She even had to concede that GPS is the greatest tool ever, technological updates from other fields are being grabbed up in archaeology and anthropology as fast as they come along. More support for my position, I say. Excel all the way.

After class yesterday, I gave myself a thorough tour of the library, got into the PSU student access websites, found the extra material my art history prof posted for us to access, and then found the Chinese and Japanese literature in translation sections and checked out two titles from 18th century dynastic eras. Ever since I read "Memoirs of a Geisha" in 1997, I love to read these type of stories of long-lost cultural eras in Japan and China, I just get lost in the beautiful imagery and genteel mannerisms. Like I don't have enough reading to do right now?

Last Saturday I had a chance to catch up with my pal from the B-store days, Linsey, and she had a new laptop, bitemarks from a Doberman puppy/piranha, and had enjoyed her first non-retail Christmas in forever. We met at a very busy Zell's, kept a table occupied way too long chatting, and left smelling of really good homefries. Smoked wild salmon omelette cannot be recommended highly enough, so so good. She's all in Career Chick mode, which is great, she's got a great gig right now, but I wish she'd get back to writing her blog. Now that she has the new laptop that doesn't overheat and crash, the world is waiting...

Betty finally got herself another dog, my brother and I heaved a huge familial sigh. Since she quit working her part time job after Christmas, she's been cooped up in her condo and going sour fast, she didn't have anything to take her out of her deeply grooved rut. Of course, any step forward is good in this prolonged grieving process for her old dog, and I know he'll be his own little personality and eventually she'll bond with him as much as the other one. Already she sounds better on the phone, she's getting some exercise again, spending more time outdoors walking him a few times a day, seeing her neighbors going around the block, all of the fringe benefits of dog ownership. The puppy sounds like a mix of some boxer, shepherd, shorthair, tawny and about 50 lbs full grown. I told her to get some new running shoes and check the non-slip strips on the tiled stairs to the condo, he'll be a handful for a few years, pulling her around on a leash. My brother and I are so relieved.

Wild weekend, right? Maybe a trip to Best Buy to play with the computers, maybe check out the new Apple "Air", see a movie. Save the homework for Monday...such a slacker.

more moss

2008-01-15T15:49:00.001-08:00

Just in Time

2008-01-14T23:08:00.000-08:00

Since I've been walking back and forth each day to class, I keep going past this wall, and thinking, "I really need to bring my camera and shoot this wall, one of these mornings, these stones will be on the sidewalk."

Today, the entire block south and west of this corner was barricaded off, yellow police tape, cones, detour signs, the works.

So after I finished class, I went back there and filled the memory card, getting yelled at by guys in reflective vests and hard hats working on the other side of the street re-directing traffic. Some change is pending with this wall, and tomorrow it maybe started.

This wall was the main impetus for the Moss Project, although I've been thinking about it since November while leaf raking and noticing the amazing moss specimens glowing in the low sunlight. I felt like I was in a magical Welsh forest, here come the primeval wood sprites.
So, this is my newest garden in winter project, and saw all these camellias in bloom, and a trail of what I swore was jasmine. I had to track it down, and found this: below

So while I'm doing all this urban trekking, and in the barest time of year in foliage and bloom terms, this city is full of winter color and growth.
And the Moss Project will go on for a while...

This giant auger was getting placed as I was catching my homebound bus this afternoon...I'd have kicked myself for catching this amazing image but not having my camera with me. The antique steampunk pile driver was resting as the crew was smoothly landing this screwdriver from hell. I love this picture.

Here's another one, looking south:

So this huge build is at the base of the Hawthorne Bridge, and all this rich brown earth is being loaded onto double trailer trucks, hundreds of years of Willamette River floodwash and wharfside debris, clinking red bricks and crusts of old asphalt paving slipping down a thousand years into the pit. Welders, crane operators and hardhat conferences going on around the perimeter, and the rain starts coming down in a mist. Climate is a constant, and I get onto the warm dry bus. Will the wall be there in the morning?

Porch Season Exhibition Day

2008-01-13T20:46:00.000-08:00

By noon, the icy fog had burned off on the east side of the river, and the air warmed from 28 to 55 degrees, because the sun broke through and won the day.

What's a Wicked Woman on the Porch to do? HIT THE DECK!

No shorts and tank tops yet, but I turned the gold chair south into the sunshine, and cracked open the Sunday New York Times, a POM peach tea, and some Fred Meyers sushi, whereupon the bontemps de soleil laissez roulez. (bad neworleanese for let the sunny good times roll)

All the dogs and their owners were out, gradually sporting shorts and t-shirts as Oregonians tend to do when it's over 49 degrees, the neighbor on the corner was doing some pre-spring gardening. The daffodil shoots are showing already, and the birch catkins are out. I love love love this 6 month spring thing here.

Of course, there will be snow, when the Pineapple Express hooks up with the arctic blast coming down the Gorge, and we get hit with some February Freezing Sleet. But that melts so fast, it doesn't really make for a full season of Winter. Under the snow will be crocuses and hyacinths coming up already. Gentle, easy river valley winters are wonderful.

The extremely low sun position does make for a short spell in the full sunshine, and the shadows are still in chilly January mode, but the first pre-season Porch Day was successful. I'm hoping it carries over into tomorrow a bit, because I'm taking my camera to campus for some winter in the park shots, and to start the Moss Project. (teaser)

The Tao of Pho

2008-01-11T14:33:00.000-08:00

Everyone's been asking me how it's going, the school thing. And laugh at how I smile like a kid on Christmas morning. It's true, that's how the school thing is going for me, better than whatever Mary Poppins magic Santa ever left under the tree for me. I was always one of those kids who loved school, played school during the summer (when I wasn't reading under a tree) and thought August was truly the cruelest month.

It reminds me of that phase of infatuation when you don't need to eat, sleep, rest or think, the rosy sparkle cloud just carries you along effortlessly, buoyed by love and seeing the perfection of the Universe in everything.

That's how my first week of school has been. Sometimes the sparkle cloud is sky blue.

This morning I finally purchased my biological anthropology textbooks that came in last night, so we get a chance to catch up on all the reading before class on Tuesday. My first History of Prehistoric and Ancient Art class was divine yesterday, I barely got into it, thankfully a few people dropped it between Tuesday and Thursday. So for a few weeks I will be traveling in Deep Time and early history in all my classes, and reading for real what I've been gleaning from popular culture and cable TV for years. Like the 'Hobbitt' skeleton found in Sumatra that is in the center of controversy in paleo-anthropology right now; is it a new subspecies, or a child with encephalitic disease? This was on the National Geographic channel the past few months, and is showing up in my class, too. So so cool.

I'm finding out the category of anthropology I've always been the most interested in, it's called Post-processural Anthropology, uncovering the whys and hows of cultural history, and opening up the perspective to other viewpoints other than Euro-centric, Judeo-Christian, white male based. There. So now I know what it's called. (so happy)

Sipping chrysanthemum white tea and listening to classical 89.9, I find myself in a beautiful and unexpected place. There is a wonderful Vietnamese Pho restaurant near the campus that I stopped at on the way home for some lunch and chance to see the student flurry go by outside the wrap-around windows of the corner location. There are these occasions where I like to just observe and witness the whole picture and experience, to make it real each time while still marveling that it's happening. The restaurant was very busy at 12:30, and there were 5 or 6 women my age doing the 'table for one' thing, so I ordered a beer and the Bun Ga (chicken with vermicelli and the cilantro-mint-sprout-cucumber-carrot melange and sweet vinegar-chili sauce) and just relaxed. What a week! What a great beginning! Such a happy kid again. What a strange trip the past 12 months have been, and I could not have foreseen being here, now, doing this, from where I had been last January 11th, closing stores, ending so completely that 10-year phase of my life. It was a vast void of misty uncertainty to me then, what would start February 1st 2007. I like fog, I'm comfortable in it, can maneuver fairly well, and wound up here doing what has always been my greatest wish---going to school. Finishing school. Learning for real. And today the sparkle cloud is sunny yellow and gold, warm all around me, and stretching ahead as far as I can see.

Rainless in Portland

2008-01-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

STOP THE PRESSES

Dawn breaks without rain today, I can trudge up the hill to campus with my face lifted to the mist lingering on the West Hills, the building facades blushing rosy and gold, looking like I feel; vintage but restored, in my best light, ready to face the busy day.

And already I'm behaving like a student, I woke up in the middle of the night and decided to drop my Asian Women's class and take an Ancient Art History class instead, more lecture and note taking instead of grooming to be a TA next term and too much outside of class group meetings. And one more degree requirement taken care of, so I just hope the prof lets me squeeze in as a transfer student because the class was already closed online. (push push push)

I was telling my friend how I leave the house earlier than I need to in the morning, so I can sit in the student lounge before class starts and catch my breath, journal a bit, and observe the current student body. How is student life the same as I knew 20-some years ago? What are all the ways it's radically different? In what ways do they look differently, the changes of fashion and the return of fashions that lull me into thinking it's still the '70s. One thing I felt is that "my whole life is still ahead of me" feeling, and I am caught up in it as well. I don't want to waste time being bitter or sardonic, this is a fresh bag of salad I'm opening this year, let's be ready, let's be as unbiased as I can, open to the experience.

Amazing---blue sky out my north window, a small 'V' of high-flying geese, squirrels and crows in a stand-off in the back yard. It's great to be in the right place at the right time.

After School Snack

2008-01-07T13:26:00.000-08:00

Well, really it's lunch, but it is after school, my first day of school, my first round-trip to class and back. Toasted white tuna sandwich with lettuce and sweet relish and an orange.

Bliss.

And even more synchronous, my textbook for today's class arrived in the mail this morning already, so I can do the reading assigned before the next class on Wednesday. Is this perfect OR WHAT? My Intro to Archaeology prof is a funny woman who manages to keep her reading glasses hovering above the very end of her nose and they never slide off. About 40 students in all, three over 40 years old, and only two cell phones rang during class. Prof showed some slides at the end of the class period, and then it was suddenly over. Sixty five minutes, syllabus in hand, I went and activated my student email account, then headed home. I'm also seeing new shoes in my future, because it is quite a hike from the bus top to campus and all my Birks need re-soles.

I know it's goofy to be this excited about undergraduate classes, but getting to this humble place has been a 25 year journey. Bringing lots of baggage along. Yes, I'll get a job doing something, I reassured Betty, and gave up trying to explain why I'm majoring in Anthropology. She thinks I'm going to do Forensic Science like on television. Whatever. It's my money, I'm not going to worry about who gets it or not. Everyone else I know is thrilled for me, and that warms my heart so much, my enthusiasm is contagious, my face glows with it. "I got a fever, babies!" says my inner Christopher Walken. Say no more.

Chop wood, carry water. That's what you do before you are enlightened, and what you resume doing after you are enlightened. So today, I'm doing laundry and washing dishes, while reading my text between loads of clothes and dishes. I'll try not to be a total spaz and call everyone to twitter about class. But as I went over the Hawthorne Bridge this morning, it dawned on me how many of my deepest life wishes have come true in the last couple years. Big BIG wishes, major Life's Dream types. Going back to school, to get an upper college degree---in motion again. Meeting Robert Plant in person---September 2005. Having my own bookstore---done. Being a writer---varying degrees of consistency, but happening. What's left? Well, going to Provence is huge. And large-canvas painting. Singing in public. Creating a permanent grand-scale garden with a varietal bamboo grove and tea house. Finding a great guy. I think that's about it. And I think they all look doable from here, because the really big ones at the top of the list are checked off already. Holy shit! So so cool.

Tomorrow morning is Intro to Biological Anthropology, and Asian Women's Studies, a senior level class. Hominids, neolithic tool makers, the beginning of art. Asian cultures to prehistory and the roles of women in it. No wonder I can hardly sleep at night, I feel incendiary about this stuff. "So why aren't you taking any business classes?" Betty wanted to know. There's no fire there for me, it's a bucket of someone else's cold ashes, not even mine. Finally, I'll quit explaining, it should be evident to everyone by now.

It's So Funny

2008-01-05T11:07:00.000-08:00

Finally, this school thing is starting to feel real to me. I was protecting my fragile heart from disappointment all these months, with the missing transcripts, delay delay, uncertainty about the process, the worry that it's really just too late to be relevant.

It's real. It's really happening, I am now a full time student again, it is OFFICIAL. I did it!

Crossing the line of demarcation almost effortlessly yesterday, while standing in a line for my photo ID, gripping my stack of 'welcome students' materials, smelling the strange mix of fruit gum, coffee, vintage 70s student lounge and youth in the air, I emerged a student. Say hello to the new peculiar institutional structure, go stand in long lines, there's always a few hundred people doing exactly what you want to do when you want to do it, and off-campus living means structuring my time when on campus to get more things done. But I quibble.

My hair looks fabulous. The gray was growing in fast and furious, so the fine student Emily at the Aveda School salon layered in some warm brown and light blonde to take 10 years off me, and gave me a swingy flip cut that brushes my shoulders. That photo ID card will be my constant friend for a few years, and I didn't want to scare myself each time I pulled it out. After scoping my required textbooks at the school bookstore, I came home and ordered online for a fraction of the price, saving enough to pay for half a new laptop. That student discount can really come in handy.

Most of the orientation was kind of a snooze, I'm afraid to say. It was a full force gale outside and the tour leader's voice was whipped away, and we all just followed her like baby ducks from stop to stop as her arm waved in this direction and that. Okay, there's the library, look up the hours later, here's the music building, looks neo-classical easy to remember, here's the athletic complex, check specifics later, student parking structure, dorms, health clinic, student center, engineering , let's go back check your maps. Since I hadn't waited until the very last minute to register, I skipped out on the 'how to register' section at the end of the afternoon and went to the text bookstore before the other 350 newbies headed over there. The campus looks very urban after dark while rush hour traffic crawls by at 4:30, the bus really is the best option.

It just feels so perfect, completely right, on-target, natural and fulfilling. So I'm already thinking ahead to grad school. A four year plan to getting my masters degree is the bigger picture as it appears to me from here, and it looks doable. Anything else just fades into unimportance in comparison, except the usual; animals, friends, crafting, Porch Time, and gardening. Gone gone gone are all the days and years of not feeling genuine in my own life, going through the motions. Instead of automatically reflecting back to my old retail-centric life, I'm enjoying the distance I feel from it all now, it's really fading away, too.

It was easy to close down my booth at House of Vintage, it felt like the right thing to do, and the rumor is the building is going to be sold anyway. I'd made about as much money with it as I was going to without a cash infusion to keep buying to restock it, and that wasn't happening. So, I'll keep crafting to sell online, which is no rent, and I can work on it at my own allowable pace with school and everything else. It's all good. Fabric Depot was having a 40% off sale yesterday and today, and I found some yardage I really love for a futon couch cover, so I'm going to head over there later this afternoon when the Estrogen Brigade thins out at dinner time. Why bring toddlers to a crazy-busy fabric store? It's insane. Shop in shifts and leave them home. Please.

Betty is waiting for me to call and give her the report on school updates. Better have some breakfast first.

May Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot

2007-12-31T22:34:00.000-08:00

New Year's Eve, the birthday of Anthony Hopkins (70) and a guy I used to date in Florida (56), and somewhere in the world, my Brazilian pal Suzanne is remembering the same 1999 into 2000 New Year's Eve we spent partying like it was 1999, knowing we were going ahead into the new millennium in different directions, this night would not happen again. She was more stuck in Florida than I was, and was frankly jealous I was planning on moving to Oregon. We got to be really close friends while working together at the B-store in Boca, then when I left in July she never returned my emails or calls. Mutual friends said she had taken on her own store, was buried in work, and had to cut some ties. I understood, I'd done it myself. But I hate when great people leave my life. Tonight I'm not partying at all, I'm doing a Martha Stewart, baking date corn muffins and knitting a new black tweed wool cardigan, and the nutmeg is wafting into the living room just about now. I have an early appointment tomorrow.

My other blast of the past situation is playing out in the morning, Jasmine Tree Girl emailed me that she wants to hash out the relationship breakdown from the summer of 2005, and I said okay. My other friends have cautioned me, that this may not be recoverable, and I'm full of apprehension about having this chat, but don't feel I have any illusions about reviving our formerly sisterhood connection. I can predict that she'll not like what I have to say about it, and the whole thing may conclude for good by noon. Or, she may surprise me, it may make sense to her after all, and we can take a few steps forward in a fresh start in 2008.

Starting this blog last year about this time, I was facing a huge new threshold, a big expanse of unknown, and was paddling as fast as I could to conclude the heavy work of closing my stores and taking care of my people. It was easier for me to stay occupied with all of that and set aside my own coping until February 1st 2007, when I would be officially unemployed. As I've written about here, and spent hours and days re-examining, there's been so much discovery and release of old burdens this past year, and I am really happy where the past 12 months have brought me. Having this woman choose to contact me right now, and want to resolve things right now, I just don't want to get bogged down by something I was feeling settled with. Do we really have to excavate this whole thing now? I don't even care anymore if she understands my perspective like I did at the beginning, I don't need her to say I'm right or even agree about any of it. But she wants to understand more, and I'm going along, I guess for old time's sake. Either way, finish it up and keep moving, that's where I am about it all. Then drive to the gym and sink into the eucalyptus steam. Happy Spa New Year.

The muffins are out of the oven now, OMG, sometimes I forget what a great baker I can still be sometimes. I think I'm going to do more baking in the new year, brownies and muffins have been well received in the last few weeks, and it makes the morning coffee ritual so much more nurturing. And fortifying for the trek into the haunted house in a few hours...

Happy New 2008, new risks, new rewards, new journeys, new friends, continued happiness. Starting the Official Countdown to Porch Days 2008, 89 days away, or the first sunny days above 50 degrees, which ever comes first.

Lighten Up, Hon...

2007-12-30T17:23:00.000-08:00

Okay okay, here's some chili con carne for us all.

Mr Torso and Aqua Girl were at the pool this morning, outdoing each other in the fast lap lanes, lots of camaraderie and coaching. (oh brother) He had been there Friday with one of the other Betty or Veronicas he shows up with now and then, which is more shy teasing and wow, you're greats. (yech)

As is his wont, after finishing his 90 minutes of laps, he emerges fully formed from the azure depths and relaxes his godly form in the pit of fiery waters, more to converse with we mortals that are his pitiful subjects. (verily) As surely he is omniscient and omnipotent (stop) Mr Torso, God, steps slowly down the tiled stairs, adjusting the strap on his tinted godly goggles, finally reaching the floor of the turbulent flaming pool, he takes a deep breath, and stands there glorious. Not moving. For an interminable time (like 20 or 30 seconds). As the water ebbed to the top of his loose fitting, low-slung swim trunks, my gaze worked slowly up the Elysium Fields of his heavenly torso like the hands of a newly blinded sculptor. Held captive by his loveliness, he stood there immobile before me in more humbling magnificence than the Monolith of 2001: Space Odyssey (cue soundtrack) The chatter of the other mortal subjects fell silent. Then, he lowered himself to the benchseat, the whirlpools of Charybdis overtaking the golden fleece in a temporary victory. His eyes closed in elegant repose. (breathe)

What is up with this guy??? I veer from "Thus Spake Zarathustra" to the acoustic guitar intro of Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs Robinson" in less than three seconds. Someone suggested he reads my blog and is jerking my chain. Well, he is definitely jerking my chain, I doubt he reads this blog, but I don't doubt that he is fully aware of his affect on women of all ages and is juicing that to the max. Why oh why (but thank you) does he stand in front of me like that, literally 18 inches from me, and just stand there, up to his waist in hot water? When he gets out of the hot tub, we all watch him go up the steps, and turn right to (side elevation view) go to the sauna, then we look at each other and smile, roll our eyes and a few older ladies even giggle "I'm not dead yet, Ruth" so he has to be doing this on purpose, right?

Why do I care? Well, he's a beautiful man, and although has the body Michaelangelo might have made, he's not as petulant as David (who's always looked kinda 'Hey Sailor' to me) and has that amazingly perfect turfscape. And the being 18 inches from nearsighted me aspect. He's consistent, and never lets the sheilas keep him from his workout. Everyday, even on Sundays. I like that. I'll miss him, now that class will fill up my mornings, only Saturday and Sunday mornings will be my windows of breath-taking scenic vistas. Alas...

I think I saw him dressed once, wearing his little homeboy baggies and a brimmed cap on his shaved head, hoodie and silly shoes, talking to one of the very young women at the front desk. Call me superficial, but he was doing too good a job of hiding in plain sight, masking his magic. As I came in the front door, I brazenly walked up to the desk, looked him in the eye, and gave him a flirty smile. It may have been him, I don't know, he had his baggy shirt on.

It's Not About the House

2007-12-29T10:38:00.001-08:00

House Envy---

It's ugly, petty, beneath me, and merely a distracting symptom from the real issue.

I'm not a monetarily successful middle aged woman. Meaning, I did not succeed at a high-paying, high-powered job, was not "old money", didn't inherit it, marry it or work to support a man who would reward me with establishing a lucrative practice then bequeath me a hefty divorce settlement and child support---god, I did it all wrong. Can this pitiful life be saved? Is it too late now?

Some of my friends have politely asked me how the lunch with long-lost Jasmine Tree Girl went, what's next now, are the edges mended?

It's been two weeks already, and I'm finally almost done sorting through all the upturned earth that day left behind for me, and seeing what's there. And like I said, it's not about the house, and I'm not jealous of her (though I have been in the past), it's about seeing my life in her mirror of success and being much more Shabby than Chic after traveling much of the same road with her, we began in the same place, in the same restaurant kitchen job. We made such different choices and arrived in the same town again, but it looks so differently. I mean, a woman doesn't usually say to herself, 'Wow, how can I financially sabotage my life? Let's do this,' does she? I never did anyway, but I also very seldom said, 'What is the Biggest Money route here? I'll do that,' either.

J.T.G.'s new house is a 1920's bungalow showcase. She and her husband have slaved on it for over a year, and they've done a beautiful job. He brought funds, she already owned a house, they combined strengths and created this dream home. I loved it, and can see the labor of love and commitment it is, they have fine taste, and have made it their home together. Both of them have jobs that take them away from it for such long days, that it's their retreat and sanctuary on Sundays when they cocoon and sleep. They nurture each other there and it shows in each unique detail of cabinet, glass, color, fabric and light.

Is this what they call "settling down"? Adulthood? I told a friend that for a while I felt like I had walked into an episode of "thirtysomething" and was the impractical, whimsical artsy chick and Hope's older sister and I were chatting while Hope was making tea in the stainless-cherry-granite kitchen Michael had restored with Craftsman details. It felt like a long winter afternoon to me, and I left at 4:30. With an entire fallow meadow overturned in my soul, what does it mean, how did we arrive at such different places, what would I have done differently, what is this going to look like now, what do I want to do with this? It is and it isn't about the house, it's the paths to the house that I'm analyzing, and I'm not resolved yet about it.

School is 100% of my headspace right now, and that afternoon has receded into the mid-winter murk somewhat. No, I didn't give her my blog address, and we've only exchanged one email each since then, everything is open-ended and friendly. We've both moved on quite a distance, so it remains to be seen what's next. Finishing my degree is so much more than merely fulfilling credits to an end goal, and I'm reminding myself every day over and over that this is really happening, really really happening, my 'Student, Interrupted' phase is getting mended, healed, fixed-up, revived. This is such a huge thing to me, in some ways I'm 19 again, then I catch a glance in the Success Mirror and see what the rest of the world sees, and it stops me cold. Still have much to sift through, I guess, and school is the best vehicle to do it.

Silent Solstice

2007-12-20T11:37:00.000-08:00

A dear friend of mine is the happiest little Christmas elf I've ever known. She's sparkling with that classical Christmas Spirit that is sincere, heart-felt, generous, and evergreen. We can out-do each other in snark contests, but when Autumn and Thanksgiving roll around, she creates the traditional Christmas Home and Holiday experience for herself and her lucky family. And she enjoys doing all of it, fits it all into her working schedule, and pulls it off splendidly. She gets her Christmas cards mailed before the 15th. This morning I received a beautiful ecard from her, with a chorus singing 'Silent Night', of a snowy lake shore and gazebo, cue snowfall, light Christmas tree, skaters glide, night falls and the moon rises. It reminded me of being about 6, the Mythical Winter of 1967, when my dad stood outside night after night spraying water onto the backyard to create an ice rink when I got new ice skates for Christmas. He installed flood lights on each corner of the house so we all could skate at night, and the neighbor kids came over with their hockey skates to play off the street (which was solid ice for weeks) and I spent hours out there. We didn't have a gazebo, just a big white doghouse, but the moon did rise beautifully, and it was so far below zero for days at a time, that you could hear the Milky Way tinkle and chime overhead over the scrape scrape of your skates. The big multi-colored Christmas lights on the eaves around the ranch house made it all feel even more magical and outside of time, and the sub-zero silence was profound, even to a 6 year old.

That is the Magic I love to create this time of year. Even without ice skates, without the home-made ice rink, the 10ft high snow banks, or even the 30 below zero nights playing outside, what I love about the start of winter is the deep stillness you can find, and how the chill makes all the lights even brighter. This time of year all the colored and white lights come up, but to me it all has little to do with Christmas, even though that's why most get put up. The darkest time of the year, with short and shadowy days, calls for the most stars and moons and Milky Ways we can find, to bring outside for each other to admire. Late December to me is monolithic pine and fir trees blanketed in snow, then shrugging it off later in a good wind to sigh all night in relief. I got to wear the hand-knitted sweater my grandma made for me that was too big the year before. It's hanging on to the nylon rope while our black Lab Whiskey pulled me in my slick plastic boots down the icy road fast enough to make my eyes water. Outside was where it all was for me, the fun, the beauty, the make-believe kingdoms.

Holidays, cooped up indoors with uneasily blended families, lots of cigarettes and alcohol, hurt feelings and other injuries---"I'm goin' outback to skate!" met with some chuckles, a reminder to wear the dry snowpants, and go through the garage. Within minutes, I was free.

Hours would go by, people would start to go home, one of the neighbor kids would come over with his new skates, it was so quiet, the air smelled so fresh and blue, the fireplace smoke would float by once in a while, and to me, the whole Santa and Jesus thing just wasn't this good. Polar winter was what I loved, snow forts, tobogganing, your nostrils freezing together, all the ways the snow sounded depending on how cold it was, the green smell of cloudy afternoons, the liquid amber sunsets glowing through the icicles on the front of our house.

Working retail and restaurant jobs for so long brought me to a high bitterness with the whole Christmas idea, the cranking, wheezing and groaning machine of it, the Mall of it. Tuning in to Solstice is closer to what it means to me, but not in any kind of organized Pagan denomination either. Work-wise it was always a misery for me in my professions, then add on what people in your life expect you to play along with. For years, I just boycotted the whole thing, played Scrooge better than anybody and meant it. Anyone who's heard David Sedaris perform his piece "Holidays on Ice" has an understanding of my personal take on American Christmas in my tarnished experience. To those who love and do it so well----I salute you.

My neighbors throw an outdoor winter blitz that can only be a Rite of Baccus, and I think they frolic naked and debauched around a roaring fire, but I don't want to look. With all the leaves gone now, and the bloated chorus at 1:45AM, there are just some things that should remain a mystery.

This year it's different, in every way.
There's no sick employees and customer madness, no greasy aprons and slow-healing burns, no drunk and surly boyfriends or relatives, no feuds or car wrecks, no frantic, no airports, no bad Jello to choke down. The sourest part of my Inner Scrooge is getting some rest and twinkling lights therapy, does not have to teach a lesson about over-consumption when someone wishes me a Merry Christmas, and is taking the next few weeks off in honor of my Christmas Elf pal.

I almost don't know what to do with myself. Got on a hand-knit sweater, strung up some colored lights, and I even saw a movie filmed in Siberia that just blew me away. My bones like the milder Portland climate these days, but Elemental Winter just awes me. There's so little human interference with it, and I respect that power, and find it hauntingly beautiful.

Under All That Weather

2007-12-18T12:34:00.000-08:00

I'm so sick.

Ugh.

So today is short and crabby.

PSU has my transcripts and all is underway now.
Saturday I met the Jasmine Tree Girl for lunch at the Kennedy School---so much to say, but not today.
Never underestimate the power of Taco Bell to raise the dead( or someone who looks like it, feels like it and drives like it.) Two double decker taco supremes and a large Pepsi made me believe I was going to live again.
While in the fever stage, I hallucinated an entire three story haunted home with made up best friends and we were ghost-busting and painting the walls, reinforcing the assorted balconies, setting up a pink fur bar and lounge area, fighting over the secret rooms, hanging lights and putting in cable outlets. I woke myself up, shouting for help to get unstuck from between the worlds, hanging by a piece of loose carved molding over the cobble stoned street, and the shimmering, evil hungry ghost was ready to annihilate me. The two cats were looking at me with worried faces, from the safety of the hallway.

When I wake up again this afternoon, I'll take the long hot shower, change every linen and article of clothing anywhere near me, and try to make it up to the cats. I'm not usually violent.

The Russian Returns

2007-12-12T09:36:00.000-08:00

After an absence of several months, the resonant voice of The Russian rose from the group of old men sitting near the pool, and I could discern they were conversing in Russian. There's just no mistaking his voice, and the last thing I ever want to do is interrupt him and make him stop talking. Being surrounded by tile and water, we were in a unique sound chamber that amplifies every layer of acoustics, especially those palatized Slavic vowels, so I sat in the 105 degree hot tub with my eyes closed to not miss any nuance.

Someone re-starts the tub motor and enters, some women leave chatting, and I hear the voice right above me, "So hello Laow-ra, what is new in your young life?" and he's making room on the shelf seat next to me, looking exactly the same as he did when I first met him 6 years ago. Who cares about me, let's give him a chance to go on and on, and I volley the question right back to him.

"Well, I am officially retired January 1st!" he pronounces.
"Oh oh, so now you're going to take up golf?" I laughed. How capitalist.
He laughed, too. "No no, never to my taste, not at all. Now I want to do some traveling, you know, while I'm still sharp," pointing to his head and rolling his eyes. He had put in 27 solid years of work history since arriving in the United States, working well past 65, so now he wants to play a little. So I let him tell me all about it.

First there's the season in Provence in a pensione, cheap local wine and market shopping, day trips here and there, maybe coasting down to the Spanish Riviera, "Is cheaper," then to Italy and Germany, Austria. "You know Austrian shoes?" he asks. I don't. He tells me all about them, how many years they last, not flashy like Italian ones, unique craftsmanship, worth the trip.
"But you're not going there to shop, I don't imagine," I said.
"No---stuff---who needs it? But shoes, you need shoes," he reminds me. I do, it's true, like he knows somehow.
"How far East are you going?" I lean over to ask.
"East." He sits up and looks at me for a few seconds. "Not that far," he finally says.
"Prague?" I offer. Thinking Moscow and Petersburg, of course.
"Prague. Yes, most definitely Prague, it's beautiful, the architecture, still unspoiled, cheaper than Paris---and the food---" he breaks off. He goes on about the European food he can't wait to enjoy again, and what a shame it is that the dollar is so low to the Euro right now, that's why he's not that interested in London or Paris, he wants to go to Germany, Bavaria, Austria, the Czech Republic, Budapest, and it sounds very food-oriented. I imagine sitting down to a meal in a Graz restaurant and letting him order for us, bring it all, take the whole evening, talk and wine and reminiscences.
"Going any further East?" I press.
He leans towards me, "No, you mean--"
"Moscow."
"No." He sits up again. "Nothing to go there for, not a good idea, you know, things happen, you never see it coming."
"Like Litvenko."
"Anyone, anywhere, it's just not a good idea, I'm not interested anymore, I wish them all well, I want them all to be well and have good lives. It has nothing to do with me and I won't go back."

I decided to shift the topic a bit, and told him about the Nikita Mikhalkov movies I'd seen, and the Russian painting series the director did for Russian TV, so then I got to hear about all his visits to the Hermitage, the Winter Palace, and we branched off onto museums and Comcast Cable's Russian Channel One.

Thirty minutes in 105 degree water is a tough stint for anyone, so the Russian stood up to leave. I thought his wife was going to show up to let him know she was done working out, but she never did. Maybe he was there alone to hang out with the old Russian guys and shoot the breeze in Russian. I'd like to schedule an appointment for the next time he plans on spending the morning there with the Russian guys, so I can be sure to show up early and get a good seat. There's just so much more ground to cover, there's Cuba, and more dirt on glastnost, and what a joke the New Revolution was, what good capitalists the young Russians became, and why he wouldn't talk about Siberia when I mentioned Shaman mummies discovered there on TV.

Always, I remind him he needs to write his book, especially now that he's retiring. He just laughs and waves his hand at me dismissively. "Please," he says, "for insomniacs," and walks towards the outer doors.

Led Zeppelin brings down the house - CNN.com

2007-12-11T09:15:00.000-08:00

Led Zeppelin brings down the house - CNN.com

god help me if they tour...

Schlepping Towards Portland State

2007-12-10T15:40:00.000-08:00

Oy-vey, vas gibt es nach kockhen?

(oh bloody hell, what's screwed up now?)

First of all, I just love Yiddish. One of the biggest things I miss about South Florida. Hearing it and knowing people understand it when you use it. Totally missed Hannukah this year, gibt mir leid.
(bummer)

Anyway, the end of last week consisted of me on the phone at 5am calling Massachusetts and Michigan at the beginning of their business days, to see if I could straighten out what appears to be the dropped ball here at PSU Admissions Office. PSU kept emailing me and telling me on the phone that they hadn't received two of my three transcripts yet from my old schools, la dee dah, sit on our hands, glad you asked. Both Smith College and University of Michigan showed they had sent them out within two days of receiving my request letter the second week of November, and they generously agreed to re-send them without a new request letter mailed to them from me. (I don't know the obscene Yiddish for how I felt at this point, the old men would never tell me this stuff in Boca)

Helpfully, I forwarded all of these back and forth emailing threads to PSU Admissions Office, along with a note from me about my concern with getting enrolled for January, BTW the Financial Aid is essential to my being able to go, hello Houston, is there anybody there??

And then I torqued my back lugging my antique trunk around and schlepping books to Powells to sell. Ice then heat, repeat. Anglo Saxon will have to do here : Son of a fucking bitch, and god fucking damn it.

You see, if I was admitted now, like I should have been over two weeks ago when my transcripts got lost, then I'd be able to register for my classes, receive my financial aid grants and loans for January 2008, know what my open hours are, get a job to start immediately, not have to schlepp heavy things around to sell, have so much less stress, and know what is happening from day to day and hour to hour. Es geht ganz hodgekeposchge. (its all f-ed up)

Trying to take the higher Zen perspective, my being a bitch will not fix this or make it flow easier, so I won't. Each fiber of my being wants to revert to Royal Bitch mode, but I will not stoop to it, no I won't. But I need to take a day or so not-schlepping to get myself set to rights with the She-Beast known as my lower back. Futz!

PS--get "Yiddish With Dick and Jane" to learn some basics and laugh your tuches off, or read "Born to Kvetch" and "Disco Bar-Mitzvah" if you want to die laughing.

Jasmine Tree Girl

2007-12-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

Oh, the sudden surprise, to see that name in my inbox this afternoon...

Jasmine Tree Girl sent out an exploratory jingle, anyone still out there? Hope you're well, want to sip tea and talk?

Funny, I was thinking of her yesterday afternoon while washing dishes. A picture of her with very short hair is in a funky sage green frame on the wall above the sink, with a splendid blue Hindu god in the frame next to her, and I mused about how it had never occurred to me to take the picture down, not ever. I hoped she was doing well, and thought how happy she'd have been to know I was going back to school. Lala la la la, back to the Mrs. Meyers and sponge.

I didn't really hesitate to reply, but I did marvel a bit and wonder what would happen next. How will it be now, is this a touchpoint only? Or a new era of our friendship? Will we just start again from here, or go over what happened two years ago?

What taking a two year break has done for me, is to have undergone what always was my greatest fear about her, losing her, and I survived quite well. I lived through losing her, and all the part of my life that we had shared for 25 years being lost, and I'd consciously changed some perspectives I'd had for so long. There were major life transitions for me that I had walked and cried through without her, and I'd still been able to keep going, without her understanding and emotional support. I hadn't regretted what made the break happen, but I did miss her less and less than I was always afraid I would. She was the sister I had never had, and I lost that sister, and it broke my heart. But I managed to keep going, and that is good, a realization I may never had been able to make without this separation. So---that is good, too.

The daydreams we both had, about what living in Portland at the same time would be like, never really became real, and I wish it could have happened. It was a beautiful life, and real enough to me living miserably in Boca Raton to propel me out here with my cat, books and music. I thought about the best days when we were housemates in Ann Arbor, when we first met, living in the funky sage green bungalow on the cul-de-sac called Bath St., doors and windows open wide all summer, communal living and herb gardens. I brought that all with me out here, intact like a relic in amber, thinking it would all just come back to life. She was not such a preservationist, and doesn't remember those bungalow days with as much fondness as I do, and is usually much better at working from where she is now. The daydream fell apart.

We always complimented each other well, her Aquarius to my Cancer, but I had a lucid moment once listening to her, when I realized she had matured so much more than I'd noticed, she'd become a real 'grown-up', which I resist more and more as I get older. When we met, I was more mature than I think I am now, and she was whimsical and romantic---now we've flipped sides somehow, she's gotten really good at maneuvering in the grown-up world, and I want to get back to simple as much as possible.

What is next? Tea, a chat, weird silences? A long hug, tears, babbling brooks for hours?
Stay tuned.

Here Comes the Fog

2007-12-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

The fog each morning since the storm is comforting, healing to the ravages of the wind, and wraps me in a cool woolly shawl I didn't have to knit to enjoy. I think many of us are feeling a bit raw these days after the thrashing of the weekend, and feel fortunate when we glance outside hopefully and don't see splintered branches on our cars or upended root balls yawing like the threshold of Hell in the yard.

Ai-yi-yi I think, being on the side of a hill, how did we wind up with 6 inches of icy water in our newly finished basement? We thought that was all taken care of with last year's giant foundation shoring project, drains installed, weather-proofing. Not so. Only last night did I find out that there used to be a creek that flowed through the neighborhood, which didn't just disappear with homes and sidewalks, and our water table is higher because of it. The winter hurricane that screamed through here brought down the Sitka Spruce, velvety with glowing moss, the tallest in the world, twisted and shattered and pulled down to only a 70 ft trunk surrounded by spines of raw wood. The coastal flooding, power outages, the trains halted, the Interstate closed, airports shut down---everybody stop. Everybody just stop.

The indigenous people would have stopped and hunkered down and waited it out. Don't endanger yourself by pretending this storm is just a little rain, and insist on making a long trip.
Many of us made soup while the power was still on, I think it's in our DNA to do this. Make soup, gather around the hearth and stay warm together. Tell stories, mend something, doze off, find another blanket, stoke the fire, conserve your energy for the work of cleaning up after the storm blows through.

December is here with it's holidays and manic energy, the whole Christmas Machine whirring and grinding away, and the weather seems to be the only element that can slow it down. For a day or two, then it's back up to speed inhaling dollars and time and high expectations. I keep thinking "simplify, simplify, simplify" like a mantra, bring the circus down, keep your dollars and take care of yourselves, be in tune with the December Elementals of cold and wind and rain or snow. Be snug. Stay home. Don't be foolish about Nature and high waters. Mend something. Make soup and share it with people you're fond of. Tend your home fire.

Since You Asked

2007-12-01T14:32:00.000-08:00

Thanks for the support, the waiting game is tough.

Still no word from Portland State University on my admission status.
My transcripts are all in, and I've already gotten a letter that had a student ID number on it, but it may have been regarding another student with my name and some previous PSU term grades. Of course, it arrived on a Saturday, when the office is closed, so I sent off an email asking them to please look into this ASAP so it doesn't hold up anything for me.

Classes start in 5 weeks!
Aaarrrrggghhhh!

Anyway, that's where I am with school, and will probably be able to meet with someone this coming week to get going with Registration and Orientation, etc. Then get a campus job and get going with my new life. Yesterday I talked to a woman close to my age who had her nursing school books spread out all over her workspace at a shop on Hawthorne, her anatomy final is this coming week, and she was cramming. We talked a long time about Life, and the timeless what-happened-during-my-20s-and-30s, and how it's pointless to regret past choices and what got in the way the first time. She said her hardest problem is wanting to be too chummy with her professors, being her peers, and not being a stand-out too much by answering all the questions out loud in class. I didn't ask her about the Mrs. Robinson Issue, maybe she's happily hooked-up, so she didn't mention it either. I'll have to just behave myself.

Speaking of... Consistent Mr. Torso sightings at the gym have me doing laps like Aqua Girl. He's in training, I overheard him saying the other day to the only other person under 60 with him near the pool besides me. Whatever gets me into the swimsuit and the water, whatever it takes. He's got to be under 30, which means I really need to get a grip and just admire the scenery.
Whatever. Like I told my pal Jolie, lucky for me he has a cheap hobby like swimming, all he needs is the goggles and trunks, unlike some people I know who have to own horses, rent the barn, buy the chaps and hat and gear, pay to show the horses, and you never get to see them (legally) smiling and relaxing in the hot tub almost naked. But she does have the hunky ferriers...

Sorry, my middle-aged lady got loose again, got to do something about that.

And I'm not going to Florida for the holidays, since Betty and I do the weekend 3 hour phone calls, we're pretty much caught up I think, and other than getting her computer set-up working at optimal level, there isn't much reason to fly me out there. Earlier this year I had thought about it, but that was so long ago, and now all I care about is getting into classes and arranging a job around that as best I can so I still have a life, time to study and write papers, and make stuff to sell. I'm going to get a portfolio of my stuff together, take photos, and shop it around the Portland Craft Mafias and see who wants to hook up with me, to supplement the Etsy site and focus on some local interest, too.
The Oregonian did a nice article on the hand craft movement here in town, and how high-profile it is becoming nationally, encompassing re-use, reduce, recycle and how to support local shops and craftsters instead of going zombie-like to the mall to have your brains and wallet sucked dry. One December night a few years ago, I came home zombie-like from my store at the mall, poured a tall tumbler of Merlot, and spent about 90 minutes being Santa and took care of Christmas all at one sitting. Didn't even need to refill my wine glass. What a relief that was, all shipped, all done. Ho ho ho.
This year I took the hand-made pledge. Hopefully they'll forgive me.

A Little Political

2007-11-27T15:21:00.000-08:00

Sent Betty a Hillary Clinton bumpersticker from the H.C. website...heh heh heh heh heh

So I guess I'm throwing my support behind Hillary, since she's the next better thing since Bill, and we'll get more Bill, which delights me to no end. Which is why I sent mom the sticker---Betty despises them both. (evil cackle)

Hell, I always knew I'd vote for Hillary, who am I trying to kid, I just wasn't always certain she'd run. When she stayed with Bill, I knew she was at least thinking about it, get her own career back after the White House one way or the other, and she'd have to stay married to run for anything, damn his eyes...she's smart, that's why the ConFunds are so afraid of her. So, I emailed her today, just to suggest that she not sling too much nasty mud with Barack, since he'll be her VP most likely, unless he gets mad and refuses, then Richardson is my guy for the future VP. Not that Hillary has time to answer much these days, but I know she's open to consensus opinions, and does not want to uphold dirty old boy tactics. I'll put her sticker on my car, and try to convince Betty to at least give her sticker to my brother and not toss it in the trash. Unlikely.

My all-time favorite little ditty is the new "Dumb Chicks for Hillary" tactic of the angry-middle-aged-white-guys in the media, or even meaner, "Stupid Broads for Clinton" that I think Dennis Miller threw up on Fox not too long ago while hand-jobbing with Bill O'Riledup (or was it one-note 'El Patron' Lou Dobbs?). So building consensus is an estrogen thing, we've been told this over and over since middle school sex ed class, and violence and competition are testosterone things, and girls don't count, so there! Cheney is such a poster-boy for the AMAWGs, dying of heart disease, high blood pressure, terminal type-A, table thumping, war-mongering, hunting and back-slapping, this pile is mine and I'll shoot you dead, with us or against me, my way is the only way mentality---afraid that at any moment that defib gadget will fire off and keep this Frankenstein animated for a few months longer, the impotent wizard behind the curtain. I crowed like a mad rooster when I heard Trent Lott was the latest rat scampering off the sinking Bush junk---Dennis Hastert, too, both leaving before their term is up and costing their districts hundreds of thousands of dollars to put on mid-term elections a year after losing the House and Senate. I think they should use their remaining campaign funds to help cover the costs of these elections, since they are such poor losers that they take their marbles and go home so soon after being hell-bent on being elected. They should go, if they are going to be that ineffective. But I'm glad they don't represent my district and state, or I'd really be pissed off.

I'll be as glad to see the end of this 8 year dirge as I was to see Reagan hobble off to his ranch.

Not-Shop Friday

2007-11-23T09:30:00.000-08:00

The morning after...

My food stupor continues, hopefully improving after I finish this morning pot of coffee. I have russet potato peelings all over my kitchen from yesterday's meal preparations that I left for today to clean up, the sink full of dishes, the pile of tablecloths and other laundry, turkey soup to make, and a trip to the gym to swim off some of that amazing gravy Peg made to drown the whitemeat, potatoes and dressing.

Absolutely delightfully wonderful day yesterday, warm group assembled 'round the two-leafed table, lots of wine, desserts, slides from Bhutan, helpful German Shepherd doing floor scrap duty, sunshine streaming through the house...glorious day.

Thank you.

While I Wait....

2007-11-20T08:56:00.000-08:00

This waiting thing is twisting me in half.

Reading other of my favorite blogs, they write about the usual things they always write about, crafting, writing, living with non-creatives, work, family, online life, kids, politics. It's comforting to read and know that these blog-pals are forging ahead, spit to the wind, writing when they can, and knowing why they do what they do.

Talking to my landlady last night, I saw the smiling webshot of the new Brittany dog coming home tonight from the shelter, and it is heart-warming to know the house will have a big lovey dog in it again. I have been doing dog-watching more frequently, and that has eased some of my dog-envy, but it never goes away. My cats love me, I love them (little beasts), but the space in your heart for a dawg is a specific place, like for a mate, a kid, a horse. Nothing else really fits that space, and you make the best of it, and love the hell out of what you do have. My life would have to completely change some more for me to fit a dog into the mix, and I don't know how much more utter change I can handle this year. Hanging tough with what I have started in motion feels like the way to go for now, and focus on school.

And wait some more, send polite emails with a slight edge of urgency, double check my paperwork and deadlines, and wait some more. Oh yeah, Thanksgiving. Sure, happy happy, whatever. Do not tell me the admissions office is taking this week off or I will run screaming down there to lodge a protest. Since when did Thanksgiving become a week off like Christmas?
It's a one day holiday, maybe two if you're lucky, but the whole week? WTF?

I am working through some of the frustration by swimming laps at the gym, with the occasional Mr Torso sightings keeping me motivated. Sometimes it's great to be half-blind in a swimming pool, you just don't care how you look because you can't see them either, so you're invisible. Except for the Mr Torsos, they're all a sodden blur, and I just make another turn in the lane and head out for the other side, odd number out, even number back, 19 out, 20 back, 21 out, 22 back, keep going until 30 then stop counting. Collapse into the steam room, inhale eucalyptus clouds, leave the gym a new woman. Come home, still no letter or email from the admissions office, grind teeth, continue job search. My gym is open the morning of Thanksgiving, so I can go swim off the feast I will eat later, excellent! There's a rhythm to this, and it's working so far, and I look forward to enjoying my first non-retail, non-restaurant business Thanksgiving and Black Friday in over 20 years. I remember working in a family owned deli in 1986 where they closed for the four day weekend...I believe that may have been the last time I was off.

Little things...I checked out of the Multnomah County Library a series of DVDs featuring classic Russian paintings, produced by a brilliant Russian director who won an Oscar in 1996(?) for best foreign language film. His name is Nikita Mikhalkov, and he made this series for Russian television and schools, but the subtitles are poetic and he presents each artist with passion and intelligence. I had never heard of any of these painters, and Mikhalkov delves into their biography, presenting each painting with an audio setting of what the painter may have heard surrounding him while painting and perhaps chatting with the subject of the portrait. The music is haunting, evocative, and pulls you into romantic era of these artists, from early 18th century portraits through early 20th century Impressionists. Delighted to see this DVD set is available on Amazon for @ $50, now I need to find some big Taunton or Rizzoli artbooks with these painters, because unfortunately PSU has no History of Russian Painting classes in the catalog.

This morning, a break from the rain, a splash of sunshine, but the chill is here to stay. Gloves and wristmitts to keep the damp out, and my craft room is too cold to use comfortably. So it's time to move the desktop computer back into the livingroom, rearrange the furniture again, vacuum like a madwoman, toss more stuff into the crawlspace, set up an area to study for school. The cats try to help, but I wind up shutting them in the bedroom for a few hours so I can actually get something done. They always sit just where you were pushing the couch to.
One of my favorite bloggers lives in Australia and is at the "too damn hot to knit anymore" stage of summer. I am building little nests of wool sweater for the beasties to sleep in on sunless days, every old wool store-bought sweater is a potential pet bed to me, and I have the nerve to felt a sweater I didn't knit, cut it up, and make it into something new and wooly-smelling. The beasties approve and don't have to fight over who's bed is who's anymore. It's the little things...

Hot hot hot historic telenovela will be starting after Univision's Gaviota concludes the first week of December. These are great series of Colonial Mexico, with carriages, horses, swords, duels, gowns, haciendas, rancheros, chaperones, nuns and priests, Generalissimos, mysterious spinsters, etc. Should be 9pm, maybe 8pm, depending on whether they overlap it with the finish of the Gaviota novela or not, check your Univision channel. Here in Portland it's Channel 31. What writers' strike?

Dreaded Gray Descending

2007-11-12T14:23:00.000-08:00

Updates in no order of importance:

I have to get a mumps & measels shot, $85, to finish my admissions requirements for PSU. I think LBJ was still in office, the last immunization I received.

I may be cleaning houses for money, is that better or worse than---never mind.

We are out of crunchies, and two furry people are getting really crabby about it.

The wind storm was violent and blessedly brief here in Southeast, now I have a good reason to call Comcast to tell them the cable line came loose from the tree again (fourth time this year).

The arctic air mass got as far south as Palm Beach County last week and Betty finally could turn off the AC and open her windows, for the first time since March. (The Gray Ascends now in FLA).

I found another pic for my absurd food collection, perfect for today----

Entering Surrealandia

2007-11-06T10:13:00.000-08:00

The first tingling of uncertainty began running down my neck late last night, that feeling that someone left a door open to the cold somewhere in the house and it had found me.

Holy shit, what am I doing? I'm turning my life completely upside down (again) and walking straight into the unlit expanse of a new place I didn't even know I was going to until last week.
Am I crazy? Can this work out? Can I really pull this off? Do I still have it in me to be a student? Will the money come through or will I hit the ground really hard on my face in 8 weeks?

This morning the cold draft is only my back porch door cracked open to the sunrise and it's warming quickly in the sunshine. The creepies from last night are gone, but I should have expected them just about now, after making so much progress in this whole project in so little time. One more poring through the catalog's flagged pages is enough to restore my certainty that it's about damn time I'm doing this, and the biggest regret is that it didn't become this obvious to me earlier in the year. Not sure why, but it didn't, so that is past and start from here.

Everything is sent off now, the ball is beginning to roll, and now I stay busy finding work and getting other projects done (another Etsy sale came in overnight) and actively wait. Work through the self-doubts that are like having a bad hair day, they come and go. Time to start winterizing the garden, restock the booth, ride my bike to the library, sew a few pillows, check into scholarships online, go through craigslist and jobdango 3 or 4 times a day. Maybe Powells to sell a few books, check Belmont and Hawthorne shops for job openings. There's a scholarship contest I found that is judged on a written essay from one of their topics you choose to write about, for $10,000. That's my housing expenses for a year, so a worthwhile time expenditure I think. (waiting waiting)

It's going to be a few weeks at least, so busy is best. Gotta run now....

Regroup Again, With More Feeling!

2007-11-04T16:45:00.000-08:00

There was one entire sad day last week when I discovered I didn't get any of the jobs open at the Glorious Stained Glass factory. Not the manager's job, and not even the sales job, and the "thanks but no thanks" letter must have been mailed within 24 hours of that last interview, when they had another four days left until their deadline for making a decision.

Blue blue day, a half hour of stunned silence, then the rest was the swamp of dejected shadowy disappointment.

However, by the end of that day, I had circled the wagons and then set off in an entirely new direction, left the paved roads completely and blazed trails towards ----going back to school.
Started the online part of it, and the next day got the Portland State course catalog and schedule for January 2008, and sent off for transcripts, test scores retrieved from the electronic bowels of the ACT and SAT (skip PSAT) warehouse of students of the 1970s, and felt so much better.

By Friday I had had many of my questions answered by Jane Sproul at the Women's Resource Center Continuing Education Office, and I now have a sensible chronology of what to do when and what's next.

I get so psyched I can't fall asleep the past few nights, until I haul out the course catalog one more time and go over the requirements (Freshman Inquiry??? WTF???) and the tagged pages in the Anthropology and History sections, skimming Business and English/Writing, and what the different Masters' programs look like. Then I doze off thinking of studying and sitting in class again and taking notes....zzzzzzzzz until morning.

This does have a huge impact on the job search, obviously. A high-powered manager's job for only the next two months is not so hot of an idea, unless I can't get admitted until Spring or Summer Term, then that route is the way to go. If I can get admitted in time for the January 7th 2008 start of classes for Winter Term, then that $12/hr temp office thing is the way to go.
Or the mindless holiday cashiering job at any local retailer. If I'm starting school in 8 weeks, I don't care as much who's nametag I'm wearing, suddenly my Sense of Meaning is strung to a very exciting comet of finishing my degree, a solid gold Get Out of Jail Free Card, $200, Pass GO!!

Monday morning (right after Pet walking and feeding) I'm hitting the admissions and financial aid office to sign in for appointments to get more answers, and hopefully by the end of the afternoon have a rounded-out idea of a "YEA" or a "NAY" on a January start. If I have to wait a term or two----not my preferred choice, but at least I'll know and set my teeth on the bigger bone. Head down, make cash happen, stay focused on deferred gratification, still good.
If I can start in January, my neighbors will think I won the Powerball lottery, I'll be running around and screaming until the police arrive.

Winter in School, it's been 25 years since I've done that, but all intuition lights are full on green for it, all reaction by friends and family has been positive, and Jane Sproul was optimistic. I could work in the PSU Bookstore---who there would be more qualified than me?

Late Afternoon Walk in the Neighborhood

2007-11-02T16:42:00.000-07:00

These were actually taken last week, between 4 and 5:30pm. They've changed a lot since.

Dia de los Muertos

2007-11-01T16:26:00.000-07:00

Day of the Dead, All Saints' Day, cleaning smashed pumpkin off the streets day.

Also my dad's birthday, 68 years ago my grandmother had to slam the door on the trick-or-treating kids in gangster and hobo and witch costumes while my grandfather pulled the car up for the mad dash to the hospital. She always told this story with a snicker, how the bowl of buttered popcorn on her gi-normous belly started moving down and she realized this was it.

One 10lb 6oz baby later...my 5'2" grandmother came home to rotting pumpkins on the front porch, a sink of dirty dishes from the week of bachelor living and couch sleeping my grandfather had been doing, and all that candy still there from October 31st. She dove in to that project first.

It's been fun to see the swing back to door-to-door trick or treating, and last night the adorable bobbing little costumed gnomes started swimming from porch to porch, and all that delayed evening gloaming of daylight's savings time made the usual beer-in-hand of the dads in the street rather un-PC. Too bad, really, because the beer keeps them from eating all the best candy out of the loot bags and plastic pumpkinhead buckets. Maybe it will be moms with Starbucks cups glowing in the twilight instead. My neighbors' son was dressing as a scary tiger, all 2 and a half years of him, to scare the little kids, he said, rawrrr! Too funny, I think his Gran made his costume, which is the absolute best.

I used to have a picture of my dad and me, on Halloween, carving and drawing on a 3-gallon pumpkin. I had on my golden rayon satin tiger jumpsuit, probably about 3, but I'd taken the stiff plastic mask off some time earlier. My dad had my mom's dark brown waxy eyebrow pencil in his hand, and he had just finished drawing some tiger whiskers and eyebrows on my face, with a round dark circle on the end of my nose. I'm looking up at him, and he's leaning over, with his black crewcut and white crewneck t-shirt on, putting the finishing touches on the devil face of the pumpkin, a focused look on his face. It had sharp horns drawn on, and he had cut out the jagged sneer of an evil smile, arched narrow eyes, all menacing. He was good at this, a prelude to his birthday festivities every year. The neighbor middle-school boys would come over for my dad to help with their pumpkins, to be r-e-a-l-l-y scary. Then we'd wash, salt and bake the seeds on cookie trays, crunchy snacks, a great contrast to all the candy.

She Knits! She Sews! She Sells!

2007-10-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

Here's the latest little project I finished over the weekend, and promptly decided to sell it.

It's beautiful, luxurious, silky, beaded--and a bargain at $40 at my online Etsy store.

I made it for myself, and after admiring it for a few hours, realized that someone else would love it, and it hadn't given me any grief to make it, easy to let go. A sexy linen/rayon blend with faceted beads and paillettes (sequins), and the manner in which I did the pattern stitch wrong made it come out looking like elegant chainmail. I was impressed and wrote my mistake down so I could do it again on purpose. It is scarf season again, and it's easy to whip some up while watching a DVD or two on a rainy afternoon off, and enrich the hand-craft marketplace.

Besides, I'm in full assault job search mode right now and am not anywhere nears the challenge of a Shula-sized headache, like a cashmere sweater made with spiderwebs and pins.

I have an interview with an esteemed Portland art glass company tomorrow morning, and I'm trying to not be nervous. Love love love glass, always have, and I think it would be a fun job and give me something new to learn from the inside out. It's just been so long since I had to cold-interview, I hope I do alright. The responses from all the applications I was sending out are coming in steadily, so tomorrow will be good practice no matter the outcome.

Plus, I've decided to try and get back to school next year, and have begun the whole process of filling out applications and forms for that, also. It is very different than the first time I did it while still in high school, but luckily some things are now free (sending transcripts) and almost everything is online and fast and easy to find. The thought of Portland State has been floating around in my mind for a few years, and somehow the idea of being in a classroom and writing clicked for me the last few weeks. What will transfer, what will not I can only guess, but after all these years, anything that does will help. Skipping down to the PSU bookstore to pick up a course catalog will send me spinning with excitement (it always did, even then) as I mentally try on taking these classes. Getting into the Spring term would be great, but it all depends on if I just am too far past meeting any deadlines for applying. There's a department for Women's Resources that includes Women's Continuing Education, and I contacted the point person there, and the admissions folks---where do I even start with this? I can already hear the snickering of the poor student working at processing these emails "Duh, hello? It's obvious, damn boomer" delete delete. Maybe not. Going forward, this is another layer to the Larger Plan I have, finish the degree, keep learning, that's always been the plan: Keep Learning. Always. Keep knitting(thanks, gramma).

Laugh Your Ass Off

2007-10-18T11:58:00.000-07:00

Today's Poppalina Blog

I'd love to go get sloppy drunk with this woman, or a least tea-tipsy...

Okay, the joke is that the sweater pattern came from an old
knitting book from the 40s or 50s, I think, and the pattern
was called 'Jason', and Shula started the sweater and began to
refer to it as Jason, and it took on all the qualities of this bloke
in the picture and their up and down relationship (hell of a
knit project, tiny needles, yarn like thread, huge size, tedious),
and increasingly she was over it, over it, OVER IT!! See the
relationship connection? Plus she whaps us with her cursing,
biting humor, and it's a riot (to us knitters). Never mind.

The Actively Waiting Game

2007-10-18T10:46:00.000-07:00

Absolute flurry of activity since Monday, and now I am on pins and needles, wondering, waiting, carrying my phone to the powder room so I at least hear it ringing, checking email 17 times an hour---no it's not the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, I'm waiting for word from some of the many applications I've been submitting, and still applying while I'm waiting.

My friend Steven has helped me do a breakthrough with this process, by reminding me of some staggeringly obvious things about Working: A: If you don't like it, quit soon.
B: If you need to work ASAP, it's okay to take
another retail job and keep looking for
a new job while you're earning money.
C: There's a million office jobs that will allow you
to leave the job at the office, to go home and
do the art, writing, craft pursuits that you
have re-prioritized as essential to your new,
non-B.store manager Life.
D: You had a great sabbatical, keep your values.
E: Get serious about your money & your worth.

Whew! Is he a pal or what? I've promised him a fine dining experience at our favorite local restaurant Venerable Quandry as soon as it is feasible for me, and probably some more stops at Pok-Pok nearby.

I've already checked phone and email twice while writing the above, this is madness.

So, part of the Re-invention Process for me is also remembering the interview process from the side of the table I am now on, and being warm, engaging, disarmingly competent, using just enough corp-speak to sound like I know what I'm talking about but not so much to sound like a Dilbert cartoon, and find out what the holiday scheduling will be like---I'd still like to figure out a way to get in a four day stint to FLA for Christmas, or at least get a few days off. My new priorities are showing.

I also need to make a list of all the places I've applied to, after 12 you can start to forget. This is when it really hits me that I haven't applied cold for a job in over 10 years, and before that, there was a lot of 'he knows my friend, who worked for them, who dated her' kind of thing. How often is too often to call to check on your app? My rule was if they call more than once every other day, that's too often. If I didn't respond within a week, it meant I was not interested in setting up an interview with the applicant. But the County, State and City hiring procedures are based on a cut-off application date, so if someone applies right after the job was posted, the waiting period may be three or four weeks until the hiring manager even looks at the applications. Now that I am the applicant, it gets me growling, grrrrrr.

My booth is still operating, but I had to re-evaluate the profit vs expenses aspect of it, and since I always knew at least a part-time job was in my future, I decided to do something full-time that was less interfering to my personal life than retail management, and secure benefits, too. Once I gather some more capital funds to invest in the project, I'll see greater returns, and besides, it's still a blast and very creative. In fact, I feel like I'm just getting started with it, so taking the pressure off of it to be my sole income source opens it up to more whimsical and funky ideas, just in time for the Holidays. Overall, all is good with Groovy Rhubarb. I have so many cool sweaters to sell, and things made from old sweaters that I felted and fabricated into new items. My great-aunt Meta would be so proud (and 112 years old) to see my craftiness, and she would know that she was the greatest contributor to this obsession I have, Auntie's influence lives on.

Official Blog Day Official Post

2007-10-15T16:49:00.001-07:00

My favorite blogger has stopped blogging, and I'm concerned.

But I don't want to be a nudge, so I'll just hash it out here, in my safe little blogspot.

This esteemed person has put years into building this blog, has thousands of readers, hits and links, hundreds of posts, topics and famous persons who read it...and it's fizzling it seems due to situations beyond their control, and I'm getting frantic that all that work will be lost to the ethers.

Reading this blog re-started my own blog engine last year, after I had already given up on one that was pious and book review-based, and I couldn't keep at it in my free time because it was just more work, at home and that killed the thrill of doing it. This inspiring bloggerperson set the spark to the gasoline that was forgotten, and I was ignited to write again.

So I'm kinda worried, and how can I help out?

And how does one end a blog, anyway, if one wants to be done with it? A formal, Fare-Thee-Well posting, with a connecting link to someone similar for your avid readers to try instead of you? A quick and brutal, "F-you, I'm outta here!" and eternal silence? Delete the whole thing at your server page with no peep, evermore? Like breaking off a starter-phase romance that you just don't have the time or energy to hand-hold at all, "Look, it's not you, it's me, and you deserve some blog who can better meet your needs, I'm just not in a good place right now, no it's nothing to do with you (but it does, you're drippy) I just need some space and maybe started this without being really clear about what I want yadda dabba doo" and it's over before the drinks even get to the table? TMI, I know.

Maybe some anonymous reader (who happens to know the blogger's location) could send them some incredibly decadent chocolate somethings, with a teeny note that says "Get writing soon" and a smiley face.

Or a new laptop.

Not that I am in any position to manage anyone else's life (my own is barely managed) but sometimes a person has an insight, and it can't be too nosy to pass it along, right? With cookies or cuppycakes? Or that lively young stripper who works at---never mind, it was just a thought.

One of My Favorite Fantasy Journeys

2007-10-13T14:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, so now I am your personal New York Times Liaison---

Take a trip to Darjeeling

Nobel Prize for Literature: Doris Lessing

2007-10-13T11:25:00.000-07:00

Doris Lessing interview

Gosh what a lot of carping about her winning this year, some of the comments are so snipping (Harold Bloom, of course) and almost sophomoric, I was laughing in my coffee this morning.

"Unreadable" Harold said. When has that ever stopped someone from winning the prize?

And I have to confess that when I tried to read "Love, Again" this summer, I put it down and walked past it for a week or two, then finally tossed it into the next bag of books to sell at my booth.

It's still there.

And I gave it a really genuine try, but the fault is entirely my own. After a long stint of reading only magazines this spring, Doris' book was not appropriate for me to pick up then, I hadn't yet adjusted my language cortex vocabulary back to books and British English. She never had a chance. But I've fixed it now, and will pick her up again. And the new War and Peace translation I've been waiting 20 years for.

But I've loved reading about her in the online articles, of which there are the usual slew after her win. The link above is an interview from a few years ago that I liked the best; honest, just crabby enough, and unapologetic. Don't mess with a woman who wants to write, you're going to get hurt.
Doris on P.C.
Doris Wins Nobel

I Miss Radio

2007-10-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

You know, real radio, without 10 minutes every half hour of amped commercials, chatter heads filling every nanosecond of non-vocal intro and fadeout with inanities, overgrown adolescents trying to be Howard Stern in the morning, or the new dentist's office soundtrack of "smooth jazz".

Help. I thought I was alone out here. With mp3 players and portable CD players, a whole generation watching videos never needed radio, it was that talking crap their parents listened to when dropping them off and picking them up at school, "EN-PEA-ARR" holy holy holy. Or the right-wing-nut AM guys shouting at each other about family values and football. Obsolete.

For years, I had this idea of resurrecting radio theater, with sound effects and background music, character voices and serial stories, 30 or 60 minutes each week of pure audio adventure and movie in your mind. People gave me weird looks and shook their heads. "How would that make any money?" they asked dismissively. I was thinking how it would be great fun to introduce middle schoolers to it, with the whole "studio" experience so there would be some unknown territory for them to be awed by and then learn to master, grow confident, and have some secret swagger to take to high school with them. "I know how to mike sound effects and shrill character voices," she said a bit smugly to her guidance counselor. Kind of like Steamboat Punk, leaning back onto older technology and see what it can do now, make it do new things now, revive it for a new generation.

This summer, I had this vision of "Old Fashioned Porch Nights", with some strings of icicle lights glowing, a bunch of neighbors sitting on a wide porch after sunset listening to some old radio show recordings (mp3 or CD) and old big-band music, and talking, sipping cold beer or wine, knitting, mending, reading the paper or even laptopping, no agenda, no plan, just folks and some low-key leisure. People I shared the idea with nodded and said they thought it was a great idea, kinda odd but weird in that Portland-kind of way, "You should do it!" they said. Remember the whole Utne Reader magazine "salon" thing from the 90's? Great idea, no legs.

The other day it hit me that having no real radio in my world has left a huge gaping hole in what I have always considered my foundation identity. Ye-gads, why has it taken me this long to realize it? I don't know really, having OPB and 89.9 and KBOO just wasn't exactly hitting it for me. For all the years working for the Big Book Store, we had new music coming out our ears, and played a revolving playlist every open moment and the really good stuff before and after hours. You got to hear music from co-workers you would have never found on your own, and the best of local heroes who play around town. I took it for granted, completely.

Now that I solved the puzzle, I took immediate action. Not willing to sell my soul and remaining self-employed dollars to iTunes, I started searching for the best of what had to be on Internet Radio, and I found one that has pleased me very much. The name implies its philosophy, and I'm not endorsing it for any reason other than it has served me nicely so far, and I hate to keep secrets about something this inalienable-rights-ish and easy to share: Slacker.com Rules!

No, they don't have old radio shows, I'm still on my own there (for now) but they do have a pretty broad assortment of music and the gadget to make your own list of stations and play any version of the Way-Back Machine you feel the need to indulge. And unlike playing a stack of your fave CDs or iPod playlists, you get to hear random songs by random artists so the whole tedious predictability of spinning your own tunes is blasted out of the water. WOW---the randomness of Real Radio, and no videos to distract you from what you're doing or supposed to be doing, leaving you free to work or whatever. The magnitude of that alone made me feel as if I had rediscovered electricity, and after a whole energized afternoon of productivity, I emailed my pal Jolie that it felt like a blood transfusion, "This is the missing element, why did it take me so long to figure it out??"

"That's what kids are good for, I get to hear it in the car everyday, happy you're back on it," she laughed, "I'm downloading the Slacker desktop player right now, thanks!"

So there's the feeling silly part, that it took me years to figure this out, but there it is. Fixed now. And no pesky commercials and robot DJs or idiot un-comedians. My productivity has quad-rupled, making the inner Boss Lady very very happy. "Back to work, slacker!"

Nostalgic Autumn Projects

2007-10-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

Autumn Childhood Fun Ideas:

Iron beautiful leaf specimens between sheets of waxed paper (low to med heat setting on iron)

Add grated or shaved crayon bits to it for a stained glass effect

Collect glossy horse chestnuts and pile in a bowl or fill a vase---add branches of sumac, mountain ash or bittersweet

Drill holes in chestnuts and make big strings to hang up on fences using shoe laces or twine

Caramel apples with wrapper caramel (easy) or microwaved caramel cubes (still easy)

Rice Crispie treats with some melted caramel cubes stirred into the marshmallow goop, a dust of cinnamon and some chopped dried apples stirred in, too

Dip pretzel rods in white chocolate for skeleton snacks

Make dried gourd monsters (or luminarias) with sandpaper and a Dremel tool, paint and tea light inside

Thread sunflower heads together and hang along with the chestnut strings on your fence posts for the birds and squirrels (peanut butter is optional)

Make a giant Trick-or-Treat loot bag out of a white pillow case and, with a black marker, draw the mask from "Scream" on it so the open side is at the top

Make more "Scream" masks from white pillow cases, open side down, for your shrubs near the front door to pull over the bushes on Halloween Night.

Fill an old (clean) milk carton with ice cubes and a candle wick, then pour melted max over it to make ghost candles

Designate once and for all that Candy Corn is purely ornamental and not really edible by gluing a bunch to some white pillar candles

Save some egg shell halves to use as bug-eyes for your Jack-o-Lanterns---carve the round eye holes the same size as the eggshells, and have the bloodshot eyes already drawn on with a pinhole poked through when you put them in the pumpkin--scary!

Turn your homey porch "Harvest" hay bale and corn stalk display into the "Children of the Corn" theme for Halloween with a big plastic scythe and ax, some fake blood, some zombie dolls
and rubber masks peeking out with red glowing eyeballs--or Amityville Horror, depending on your style of porch

Remind your mom that the "Elvira Mistress of the Dark" costume is not appropriate to drop off the cupcakes for the lunchroom Halloween party---besides, you're wearing it to school

Free Burma!

2007-10-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

Participate here

No Shame and No Apology

2007-10-03T09:18:00.000-07:00

NYTimes Dining Letters Re: Portland Restaurants: Golden Age of Dining and Drinking 9/26/07

Well, you know I have to run off immediately and buy copies at 7-Eleven and Fred Meyers so I can mail off the Dining section to Betty in Florida. I have to. Small and petty though it may be, I need to show her this, even though I can hear her comment from here--"What? It's not like you got paid for that."

And it is so abbreviated, and they left out the "See you at Pok-Pok!" which I thought was friendly and a genuine sentiment. Oh well.

More later, you know it.

Falling Water

2007-10-02T17:19:00.000-07:00

Five pm and it's dark, blowing, rainy and cold.

Sorry to state the obvious, but I just needed more time to bid summer good-bye, and I'm not going to get it. There's some leaves stuck to the street, anything yellow glows supernaturally, and everyone is wearing their shoulders in the "up" position, total defense. I begin hearing the sawing of the strings in Vivaldi's Four Seasons, audio shadows, abandoned porches.

The grass looks great, as do the remaining dahlias, chrysanthemums, and the tawny gold hydrangeas. How about some snapping fresh-crop apples and a few caramels? That's much better.

The last two days I have spent in the belly of the bureaucratic beast, three hours one day and almost three the next, remembering a time when people grew or traded for most of their food and material needs, and wondering how to get closer to that myself. By the second day I was almost in a trance from the noise and frustrated hostility of the workers and their customers, and watching so many toddlers running around with circles under their eyes and gray skin. There were five people I saw reading the Jon Krakauer book "Into the Wild" which is a new Sean Penn film also, and the irony of it made me smile. Surreal bureaucracy and eccentric survivalist meet in the Oregon Job Search offices. Unexpectedly my caretaker instinct rose up, and I wanted to sit all those little kids down to a good hot nutritious home-cooked from scratch meal. No nuggets of any kind. There's my Mid-west again...

The change in weather has brought an abrupt end to the "outside on the porch" season, and for the distraction I find such weather to be, and it's all scrub-a-dub-dub indoors. Sewing, posting items on my online site, writing, going to the booth with more stuff, putting on a pot of rice and beans, start some soup. 'Portland Rain' is a scent you can find at 'Escentuals' on Hawthorne and also on NW 23rd, and it has that subtle fresh smell with a hint of spice and wet leaves, not too heavy, and perfect for this early Autumn time of year. What they don't (and can't) manage to capture in the scent's complexity is the occasional wave of thai wok from down the street and the chimeria in my neighbor's back yard, and the wet mulch from the garden. Or whatever else you smell in your part of Portland---pizza, headshop and fried chicken? Bio-diesel, burnt toast and coffee roasting? I'm not going to go into what the waiting room at Job Search smelled like.

House of Vintage Rocks!

2007-09-30T21:26:00.000-07:00

Rainy, chilly weekend. October arrived early and started sulking immediately.

*sigh*

I went down to House of Vintage right after it opened to see how my big weekend discount sale was going, and to make the Big Decision---close it or stay open and hang tough.

Number crunching until my teeth hurt, I knew it was bad business to pull out right before the pre-holiday sales ramping started, but I thought about just cashing it out and starting something new, paying the bills and relegating the booth to the summer period.

You know what's next: Get a real job. But I have to say, I spent three hours there, going through each booth, checking out the new vendors, new merchandise at the usual vendors, seeing the shoppers and post-hangover-breakfasters moseying, buying, and marveling at the place, then going to get more coffee then coming back to look some more. And the big TA-DAH moment descended upon my shoulders---I need to stay here. This will continue to pay off more and more and supplement whatever other income I manage to free-lance upon, and be an outlet for me to sell what I make and/or accumulate for re-sale. And it leaves me free enough to do something like a (gulp) job and it upholds a huge slice of my personal values of artsy-crafting, and reduce/reuse/recycle/repurpose/resell. This was a big TA-DAH I'm talking about here.
And I found a $3 oil-cloth bag from Harrods Knightsbridge in perfect condition, perfect waterproof satchel for the next two seasons. So happy.

Dear NYT updated update

2007-09-28T10:40:00.000-07:00

Another full disclosure---

I just received a call from the New York Times, Dining section. They want to print my letter, possibly next Wednesday or the Wednesday after.

"It was a bit long," she said diplomatically, "if we edit for style and punctuation--"

"YES! I knew it was a tad long."

"A little, but if you're okay with--"

"Yes, sure, absolutely."

I raced to call my best pal in Denver. "OMG, OMG, OMG!" She's a writer and totally got it. Like when I chatted up Robert Plant, like when she snuggled Sting, we raced to call each other, shrieking like junior high girls. Instantaneous understanding.

Now all I want to do today is write. The genie (or yeti) is out of the bottle (or ice cave). I'll try hard to not be insufferable.

Dear NYT, update

2007-09-28T08:22:00.000-07:00

This morning, the story on Portland's Dining and Drinking and cheapness is still the number two most emailed story at the New York Times, after spending all day Wednesday and Thursday being number one.

Maybe because so many people west of New York only subscribe online and are interested in nearby Portland?

Or should we be preparing for the alien take-over?

(I keed, I keed, is joke)

One of my friends told me that I should be looking forward to the rise in wages the New Yorkers would bring, and I told him to calm down and get ready to wear an apron and a name tag. I think we're still friends, but it took me a while to get out of the composter he stuffed me into.

Honestly, all keeding aside, it makes me happy that Portland is seen for how amazing it is, and that we aren't dismissed as some sort of marijuana plantation clearing house. Our historic legacy and unique climate being a magnet is only enhanced by the continuously evolving art, music and literary cultures, and now the food and drink. More than Stumptown Coffee and Voodoo Donuts? Sure, why not get all of it out in the open to be enjoyed, and the local business owners keeping the dollars in the neighborhood?

There might be a blip of culture homesteaders who cash out and migrate here from The City, but we're still too far out here for there to be a huge wave like there was to Southern California, because our weather isn't as seductive, we're still too far from Japan, and even further from Europe than the East Coast. We're liberal, but isolated in the conservative zone. Might as well just go to San Francisco, where prices are more like New York and half of the old college pals are there and looking to sell, skip down to LA all the time, more familiar territory.

Just as truckers hats and flannel were a fad and are now so passe back east, I think the folks on the west coast predictably like having some rougher edges and aren't so easy going that they're all willing to become a servant class to new residents expecting submissive and impeccable service. We don't all need to be famous and we're not all eager to please and live for a big tip and a pat on the head. Have you noticed how many east coast men are over-grooming their eyebrows? What's with that? I don't think that many guys are working at drag clubs at night, I really don't. It's all cool, whatever, but again, a coastal difference. We're still goatee-ing it and no-make-up-ing it out here, because we seem to like to please ourselves first. Very cool with me. That's why I'm here.

Dear New York Times

2007-09-26T09:14:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/Portland-Golden Age of Dining and Drinking

Dear Eric Asimov,

We love that you love our city and our amazing restaurants. It's been curious this past year to see the number of articles in your paper on Portland, and satisfying to read that most of them are favorable, and for the most part accurately describe how great it is to live here. But there is one facet of your glowing article and of the other coverage that I need to bring into sharper focus: Real estate is not "cheap" for those of us who live here and are offering the "regional" level of service in these restaurants, working behind the scenes at these farms, in these kitchens, and are the support staff for these rich and successful recent entrepreneurial imports with the European and East Coast pedigree. As delightful as it may seem to see what an "average" home or commercial property sells for here, I need to remind you that the wage compensation matches the market, and no prep cook in Northeast Portland is making what a prep cook in the East Village is making. It takes a two-income couple to buy one of these "cheap" properties here because each of the two incomes is "regional", just as the New York wage and real estate levels are "regional" to New York. And in making a full disclosure, I moved here from South Florida seven years ago and have yet to be able to afford to buy one of these "cheap" Portland properties on my own. So I encourage you to continue visiting and enjoying your time here without sales tax and with "cheap, regional" wining and dining, but don't follow the traffic pattern of all the Californians who have bought here and commute to Los Angeles and San Francisco Monday through Thursday, and are rapidly changing the flow of life here and pricing out the current residents. Who will work for you? Who will teach your kids in school, pull your shots of espresso, and wash the pots of those amazing restaurants? Will we now be earning New York wages, too? See you at Pok-Pok!

Laura (etc etc)

I just sent this to the editor. The article in this morning's paper is splendid. Photographs and a glowing mention of Pok Pok, but it sent shivers up my spine. My love for this city is fierce, and I don't want to feel forced out because I can't buy a half-million dollar bungalow as a single woman.

Am I over-reacting? Not enough coffee yet this morning?

I don't think so. Linsey and I were both struck by how many reviews and travel pieces have been featured in the Times in the last year or so, almost as if some wise-ass PSU alum went to make fame and fortune in The City and writes these bits as homesick treatment. Or their sister and brother-in-law just relocated here and they visit them just a bit too much because it's all so cheap. Because it's obvious they don't actually work or know someone who works here. Their sib & hub are maybe still living off that real estate killing they made on that 500 sq ft apartment they sold in the East Village.

"I smell bitter here" says the virtual Linsey voice in my head.

Okay, right on target, so what? I want to stay, is that so wrong? And I love New York, read the Times each and every day, continue an affair with the Old City for over 30 years, have all Jack Finney's books in hard cover, New York 1880 is like a bible to me. An old map of lower Manhattan is on the wall in the hall.

Just don't ruin this place, is what I'm thinking. Visit and go home with 5 extra pounds, a tired liver and a stack of receipts. See ya next year. Look what a mess a bunch of youse guys made of Florida---isn't that enough?

Last Chance, Sundance

2007-09-24T12:10:00.000-07:00

*sigh*

Such high hopes for harvest, such dwindling results, and I'm talking tomatoes now.

Seven plants.

Planted the end of April, that caught all those sunny and hot May days, tenderly staked & watered.

I was planning on washtubs of salsa, pasta sauce, mountains of BLTs, maybe even a little table with a sign, "Heirloom Slicers, $2.00 a bag".

Maybe next year.

I'm taking the AC unit out of the window today, putting the box fans into the crawl space along with the AC, and switching out the duvet cover to the one that's already faded on one side from the reappearing southern sun in the bedroom windows. Moving the feline Lido Sun Deck of their permanent life-time cruise closer to the heater, and folding all the sleeveless shirts and assigning them to the back of the closet. Sweater Sniff-Test 101: Hint of Tresor perfume? Not cleaned since being laid off. Mrs. Meyers' Lemon Verbena and woolly? Recently handwashed, okay to hang in the closet. Where's my leather jacket now? How did I accumulate all these scarves? And how come it still isn't enough? Time to start another pair of fingerless gloves in some of that new Noro yarn? (calm down)

Summer's over in more ways than one. I am excited to be going into Fall (or Q3 & Q4 as we used to say) without thinking of it as The Holiday Build. I am hoping to perhaps enjoy this strange winter time habit of gift-giving and over eating that you earthlings call The Holidays.
I found my large gift bag of Christmas CDs that I took to the store every year, right on the floor in the living room closet where I heaved it in January, and I didn't even cringe. That's progress!

Sunwise, we're where we were in March, Equinox time, and continually working our way back again to December and Winter Solstice. This is how we Porch Worshippers calculate time, where is the Sun and when? Imagine trying to ripen tomatoes outside in the sun in March. You see why I despair. Thanks to my friendly neighbor Kathy, the solar domes are working their magic on the partly sunny and overcast days, but when it's full-on sunshine, I run out there and pull them off, do my Ripening Ritual Dance, then run inside before the police arrive.

This past spring, as the sun strengthened and the days lengthened, I felt less and less like working and more and more into seeking---answers, alternatives, peace of mind, perspectives, my current state of being. Autumn brings me back into wanting to get busy, languid is over, my mind sharpens, my hands are restless, I need a brisk walk, the day needs to be scheduled and the To Do List is no longer the TA-DA List, because now it's detailed and lengthly. It sounds almost like Boss Lady is back, and that may be so, in such a way that I am roping my own stray cattle in, that roamed all summer in the tall grass. Those green tomatoes are in for some serious discipline in their ripening attitude.

File Under Too Cute

2007-09-20T11:41:00.000-07:00

Halloween must be on the way, and the ever so helpful folks at Amazon presented me with these little costume suggestions for the dog in my life when I was looking up a book title the other day.

I guess it goes without saying that I'm having a dog issue right now.

Cats won't wear costumes. Not that I've tried. Really. Other than that one time with the sleeve I was knitting for a sweater and for fun I tried to slip it over the head of Neek when he was a kitten.

The skin grafts took rather well, I think.

Rated R for Ranting

2007-09-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

I've been on the verge of writing this topic for months, but tonight I've just had enough.

Love love love the Science Channel, National Geographic Channel, History Channel, Discovery Channel---but.

I am completely fed up with the hundreds of commercials I've tried to ignore for pharmaceuticals for this E.D. thing. Along with Flo-Max. And the cheesy music, raised eyebrow, and everything but the Mel Brooksian freight train through the tunnel. There's even a Korean Airlines one with the guy popping the champagne bottle at crotch level. And here all this time I thought guys were watching TV with just the remote in their hand.

What are the kids thinking who are watching these shows for science classes? Pre-teen boys and girls need to see this? Over and over and over, these geezers chasing their wives around the vineyard/driveway/golf course with a hard-on? "Grandpa, what's E.D.? Do you have it?"
"Grandma, what's E.D.? Grandpa said to ask you."

"Erekile Disgustion? Will you die?"

And then they hear the truth.

"EEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWW, that is so gross, ohmigod grandma, stop, I don't wanna know anymore, I'm tellin' mom you said that to me, gross!" And they look at Grandpa with that stinky face look for a long time, for years. When Grandpa tells them that their daddy has it too, they run away from home or tell the pastor their family are perverted Satanists. Here comes Family Services...

My theory is that these guys are suffering from Remotus Televisionitis Crotch Atrophy. They never have to get up once enthroned with the remote, and those groups of erector muscles just start to die. Hours and hours and whole weekends spent reclining slack and immobile, ingesting trans-fats and growing breasts. What do they expect?

E.D. How about Energy Dysfunction?

Carried away, as usual, but I'm really annoyed by these ads interrupting my richly enjoyable science shows on string theory, M theory, 86-ing Pluto and the secret life of Stephen Hawking.
Is it the rockets blasting, booster rockets with Viagra sponsorship like NASCAR? Einstein got along fine without it, read any of the latest of the racy biographies published in the last three years. The man with two brains....very sexy. Chicks dig Einstein, look at those soft dark eyes...

Anyway, I certainly am not wanting anything like a blitz for pregnancy tests, vacuum cleaners, or laundry detergent, things that advertisers seem to think only women make use of. How about----computers? Industrial technology? Banking or investments? Cars, beverages, eyeglasses? Real estate companies?

There is that hilarious one I see sometimes on the Comedy Network, for Encite, the mod 1960s spoof of "male enhancement" where 'Bob' and his lovely and happy wife are poolside by the springy diving board, have frozen smiles and all their friends are droopy and sad-looking. We can keep those, and the construction worker one with all the industrial pipes being hauled up by cranes and installed with 'Bob' smiling as usual. I laugh every time.

Malaised and Confused

2007-09-15T12:04:00.000-07:00

My astrologer said this would happen.

Sometime in September, some aspect of my future working life would resolve and become clear, and I would have a genuine "A-HA!" moment, and not to sweat it in the interim, allowing myself to get antsy and a tad worried and fret.

Last night was a fret night. Yesterday was an antsy day. So I was thrilled to get an email that a hold was waiting for me at the library, because it was a copy of "Starting Your Small Business in Oregon" newest edition with CD of extras, and I would have something solid in my hands to dive into and feed the antsy beast. Forms, charts, checklists, sample conversations, info on lawyers and accountants and taxes. Ahhh, so much better. When in doubt, educate. Works every time. As does the music I checked out at the same time as the book, Chopin's Nocturnes 2CD set, Blues in the Desert, Bollywood classic soundtracks, and the big Crosby Stills & Nash boxed set with unreleased material, cuts I haven't heard 100s of times yet, soul food.

There's the Groovy Rhubarb booth. We're just coming out of the slow time of year and going into the busier time of year, so there's going to be more income there than before. My on-line store is always expandable, as I make more and post it, there's more to sell, simple equation. And no monthly rent to pay them.

So I dove into the "craft thing" this year, one of my goals since being laid off. Cool. Nice job! And I've been writing, here and on other ideas, and that was another huge goal. That's working---great! I enjoyed the spring and summer in the garden, working on growing and eating things that grow, another huge fantasy that is now my everyday life. Again, great job! So so happy about these things, and no regrets about any of it. So...anything I haven't done yet that I was carrying around all that time as a Borders wage slave as a dream in my heart? Other than that Johnny Depp thing?

Uh, ye-s-s, and I'm almost ashamed to bring it to light. Because there's no good reason to not do it, other than my own stupidness and shyness, and inner critic hang-ups.

Somehow, I made along the way some idiotic bargain with myself that I couldn't let myself dive back into painting again until I got all and everything else organized and taken care of and out of the way. Only then, could I reasonably paint again. Until the studio was perfect, the apartment all re-organized, the craft thing paying well, the writing flowing thick and fast again, only then is it okay to lay out the brushes and pore over the sketchbook for the right project to start. To activate yet another yearning to bring forward to the light, somehow I must earn it by being some sort of Cinderella of Tasks, then I can go to the Ball and be seen and real.

"Hello, Therapist-o-Rama, can I make a virtual appointment to discuss---"

"Press 1 for Freudian, press 2 for Jungian, press 3 for Buddhist, press 4 for Kabbalist, press 5 for Wakantakan, press 6 for Nietszche Nihilism, press 7 for Gender Issues, press 8 for New Age or Wiccan, press 9 for Come to Jesus, star for Alien Abduction, and the pound key for weight issues, 0 to repeat the menu."

So, I called the astrologer instead, a few months ago, and she gave me the heads-up about the mid-September malaise and uncertainty. So here we are. Malaise-ing and uncertain.

What a perfect time to bring out the canvas, I thought. I've been fighting with it all summer, all spring, too, when I said I needed to wait until Betty came and went for the best time. Then there appeared other reasons, good reasons, reasonable reasons, so I fought it some more. Make more pillows to sell, take down more LPs and books, clear out the studio, re-do the bedroom, iron all the new fabric, read the new book, do the dishes, weed the garden, vacuum, water the plants, take VHS tapes and CDs to the booth...I always lost the fight with painting. This weekend I have a project to finish, sweaters to take to the booth, more dishes to do.
I need to face it, that there are always going to be reasons to not-paint. But the fight is making me crazy.
So then my back acts up, I get that midday headache, by evening I'm restless, antsy and starting to fret.

We know what this is. The thing we are not letting ourselves do. Biting away our peace of mind and good intentions. So you can't really do anything else fully, either.

Time to walk around the block, get the mail, and watch the squirrels bury walnuts for a while. The referee just called for a Time-Out.

Beer With Bookseller Chick

2007-09-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

Finally, a chance to get caught up with the most famous Portland blogger and also my pal and former assistant manager Linsey. Her celebrity status making even brief tete-a-tetes difficult to manage, and getting through her entourage with a message being almost impossible, it was a delight to be IM'd by L.J. Schmidt herself yesterday morning. You may also know her from her brilliant contribution to the 2007 Writers' Handbook, chumming with Erica Jong, Neil Gaiman, et al. Being so genuinely happy for her keeps me from wanting to pull her hair and teeth out with jealousy. (Jealous writers, a lethal gang indeed!)

Bringing some humble home-grown tomatoes as a feeble tribute, I spied her tall and willowy self on her way to the Bagdad and we grabbed a table on the sidewalk and proceeded to drink beer. This now being late afternoon, I should add. No bodyguards, no entourage, just we two and keepin' it real talk about life, the universe, and employment status, books, and how life is better after 25. I let her go on at length about that, agreeing with her but not wanting to be a wet blanket about the crowding 50 part of this new wisdom she's gained. There's wisdom in Hefeweisen, too, and you can get wiser and still drive home in a couple hours.

We picked the Bagdad because we are both doggie-watchers, and there's so many cute dogs walking down Hawthorne on nice sunny days, and we are both dog-less. *sigh* When she isn't doing a Houdini to get out of her bra while stuck in traffic, or shooting blue comicbook covers with friends from Darkhorse, my friend is looking for some post-retail gainful employment in the publishing industry, preferably here on the West Coast. We both had to laugh about how picky we've become after having some time off, "No nights, no weekends, no holidays, no cold-calling, no commute," and realized this will probably mean inventing some kind of work situation and maybe a limited part-time thing for moms with kids in school.

"Another round, please" as our illustrated waiter-man swept by, a DEVO shirt and faux-hawk de rigeur. He was nice and patient with our three hour squat. The woman behind us with bright cherry hair was flirting with him, and two amazingly clean and ruggedly-handsome men in their 30s sat down together, but my gay-dar wasn't working. They looked and smelled good, so I guess it didn't matter, really. We were there for the parade.

Again, Linsey and I decided we should start a business together, but with no capital and lots of ideas, it's a tad early to draw up a business plan. She doesn't want to return to modeling, and I don't want to be a boss lady anymore. I am not a Border Collie type now. We both hope that the writing thing will come through somehow, as Julia and Natalie say, "Keep writing, no matter what, keep writing!" so we both do. That thing about the money...it may be temping in our futures, a nice office-y thing for a few months at a time that we leave behind at 5:30 so we can go home and hermit ourselves with everything else we need to do that actually feeds our souls.

For me, for now, that's okay, I did a stint with The Corporate Thing already, but Linsey is early on her ascent arc and the heavens are before her. The COOL and BIG job is ahead of her, so I'm going to dust off the reference letters template I drafted earlier this spring for her, and find that logo stationery I stashed somewhere in February.

Good thing I left my entourage at home, so that none of them could see my softer side and use it against me later; projecting all this ruthless talent is hard work.

Fast Forward 20 Years

2007-09-08T12:19:00.000-07:00

This week I met the woman I want to be in 20 years.

I acted casual, easy-going, all that laid-back stuff I do so well. But my brain was spinning like a cold fusion cube, and the high ceilings with ochre paint treatments, oil paintings, narrow french doors and old-growth timber floors were wavering and rippling around me. Had to plotz for a sec.

Old historic spaces do this to me frequently, but then also meeting this kindly multi-talented woman who owns this oasis just shot me into the Never-Never Land of Potential Future Lives.

What in the world do I do now? and a little voice said, "just what you are doing already, dear"

A few posts back, I was winge-ing on about a former employee, not calling her back, etc. Bad me. So I finally emailed her, telling her how busy I am in my new careers, starting a new project, happy happy happy, gotta go. Not only did she call about the old days in our store, she was calling because she is going to be running a seasonal kiosk for our old employer this fall and winter in our old mall storefront, and she's looking for former co-workers to work for her. I may screen all my calls until February. Talk about going backwards...

Not interested. Not even a smidge. Work for her for $8 an hour. Not happening.

That would be re-wind 10 years.

Fired off a fast email to my pal and former asst. mgr. Linsey, "Heads UP!" and all that, and reminded her she would still make more using up the rest of her unemployment than going back to that situation. "No worries!" she said, "I wished her luck and told her I might be by to get a 2008 calendar."

So the take-away here is that once you've done all the mental earth-moving to step forward into your new life, going backwards just isn't an option. Because then you are being buried alive. And I don't think that's too bleak an assessment, because of all the people I've worked with and known well who felt squeezed and took the familiar step back, and then within a week, knew it was wrong, and were kicking themselves hard to numb the regret.
Keep growing, keep moving, forge ahead, stretch out, learn a new skill, surprise yourself with another thing you do well. You'll meet new people who will enrich your life, and being bored or tolerating hours of crazy-making drama will fade and be forgotten. Get outside and enjoy this wonderful gentle late summertime to re-charge, and dive back into your new stream.

Sorry for the interruption...

2007-09-05T14:36:00.000-07:00

Let me introduce you to my little friends...

l to r we have Senorita Zapotec, behind her a stripy black Brandywine, assorted Sungolds and Sugar Babys, and two Black Princes.

Plus I've been making a large dent in a fragrant pile of bark mulch, that only caught fire one time last week, as I'm happy to join any landscaping party that involves frozen strawberry daiquiris and rum raisin ice cream as a parting gift. Bring on another pile!
As we Portlanders know, we are about reaching the tail end of our splendid summer, and I have been spending every possible moment outside with the sunshine. So bring out some pillows to blind-stitch, buttons to card, the lap-top to write, weed some more and water the herbs, deadhead the roses, ride my bike to the library, read craigslist on the porch---tick tick tick as the sun heads south and sinks earlier behind the houses across the street. We put hoodies on by 6:30 lately, and that used to be the intense solar bake time. Next year again, I console myself.

I am so happy to declare that all my pillows sold out at Groovy Rhubarb, so the crush is on to crank out some more, as well as do some research for some friends who are interested in maybe starting up a book-type store that serves coffee. As a joke I told customers in January that after being laid off by Borders, I was going to open a consulting business. No joke after all. It's an exciting project for me, and makes the multi-stream new career that much more interesting.
Between the photography and the writing, research and selling, manufacturing and gardening, I am almost there. With heirloom tomatoes everyday! Other than my pal Linsey, I don't miss the old retail grind at all. I still get a little managerial when I go to Powells and see the can't-pretend-to-care service, and am disappointed these folks aren't a little more happy to be playing with books all day, but I'm getting better. I'm not buying books there, I'm selling, by the way. Plus, they sell CRAFTzine, okay?

Now That We're Famous...

2007-08-30T07:31:00.000-07:00

The next morning, here we all go to blog about the Portland Bloggers get-together last night at KATU-TV.

Actually, the station had a nice table of food and drinks, and I want to estimate almost 60 people came, and I would have enjoyed it more if one of my pals had gone with me, but no.
They were probably afraid it was going to be too much like a Star Trek convention, Dork Factor 11, Mr Sulu! I chatted with some people who didn't put their blog names on their name tags, so Alison from where? was nice, and Steve from where? was just getting his feet wet with writing, and Brad from where? hoped KATU would do this again sometime, and Kat from where? wanted pictures... I sound like I'm kvetching, but it was fun to watch all the guys make like weathermen in front of the green screen and give their outrageous forecasts to their "viewers" off-camera---"By mid-afternoon, it will begin raining frogs in Medford, and hailing locusts in Klamath Falls, Armageddon at 11." The shrimp was good.

And I have some pictures of us milling about in the News Studio, people making like Chevy Chase at the news desk, beer in hand---and I realized I can't get them out of my camera. No picture mail in my Plan. Along with the gift bag, souvenirs of an evening of shy writers talking to shy writers about writing. Funny. Good thing there was alcohol.

The Grinning Reaper

2007-08-29T11:45:00.001-07:00

No words, no mere utterances of lowly mortals can begin to describe the rapture of this harvest.

On the left, an almost ripe, pink pleated heirloom Zapotec. On the right, the pleated wonder of a fully ripe pink heirloom Zapotec. * sigh *

The Black Princes, lovely and splendidly flavoured, were unable to make it intact to the photo shoot. The Reaper is not big on delayed gratification.

So now I stalk the strip-ed Brandywines, following their every movement, listening to their plans to escape their doom, dispersing their feeble attempts to group together and trip me in the bark mulch. It is inevitable. They know this. And still they plot to avoid their Fate by staying green so damn long that they think I will lose interest and go away.

Silly Brandywines, sheltered heirlooms that they are, lacking in the hybrid's street sense that outwitting the Reaper is impossible. They smile and pretend they don't see me, la la la la la and play their stupid heirloom tomato games. What do you expect from such upper-crust stock, always being catered to, protected, hand-watered like pansies, out of touch with the grim reality of life in an urban garden? What do they think the Squirrels will do to them? Well, I can tell you, what! They will visit upon those pompous Brandywines a slow torture the likes of which they've never seen, a nibble here, a nibble there, pulling them from their fellows, stretching their stems, swinging from them like drunken sailors from chandeliers. Then a gang of those long tailed Inquisitors will yank that sanctimonious tomato from its bristling stem and sink its needle claws into it, then go in for the kill with its foul yellow gnashing teeth. Tumbling along the path, gathering dirt and bark and squirrel spit along the way, that now-humbled Brandywine will cry all the way to the compost pile, boo hoo hoo, where he now thinks the punishment is over, how low he has fallen, oh how he misses his tender loving gardener.

But it isn't over. Oh, no no no. Night falls. The whimpers of the injured Brandywine have quieted, and he's thinking of how his progeny will be sprouting next spring in this disreputable spot, but he at least will live on somehow. A small solace upon his deathbed. His tears dry, and he's comforted that it's so quiet. Peaceful.
Then, a rustle, and a scamper over the fence, thump. Could it be, that damned squirrel again, oh the humiliation of it all! But, no. So dark, so evil, so menacing---it is El Rato!! The glint in the darkness comes closer and closer, above which appears beady narrowed eyes and forward-pointing whiskers. The breath is horrible and the black bony claws grasping the helpless tomato are caked with the lost souls of now-forgotten garden victims. The Brandywine has no chance of escape now, and dies beneath this rodent vampire like the wimpy little twit he was all along.

Tomatoes, surrender to your fate! Resistance is FUTILE!!

Alternate Universes

2007-08-21T12:47:00.001-07:00

I said vehemently that I wasn't interested in having my own store. And repeated this to anyone who was nearby and probably not listening anyway. In renting a booth space at House of Vintage, I was splashing in the kiddie pool of a shop-thing, but not really committing. 'Easier than a continual yard sale, yadda yadda' and felt fine with this. Fine, I said. Really.

But that's all changed now.

Thanks to CRAFTzine's blog, I am now hopelessly in lust for my own funky green/sustainable/vintage fabric-textile-fiber-sewing shop.

Rhett, whatever shall I do now? There's no hope for me.

This picture is from Ambatalia, a fabric nirvana in Mill Valley CA, and I'm so beside myself with love and inspiration and envy that I may need to walk around the block a few times and eat ice cream or something. Good god. Like the time I first stepped into the former Hexafoo retail space on Belmont and felt faint and pierced like St Ursula with raptureous pain. Here is my ready-made life, just with someone else's (husband's?) money and some sexy younger woman living it. And a small artsy staff. Maybe I can re-adjust the time-shift sequencer and do this again slowly...

No good. The owner of Ambatalia is named Molly, and her inspired visionary oasis has classes and things for kids and moms and non-moms and our ilk of fabric fanatics; anti-mall, anti-plastic, pro-sustainable and renewable, un-crassly-commercial, very creative and unique. She begins her store blog last October 31st by talking about her reluctance to throw up the usual obnoxious Xmas window display, and how her store is so not about that. I hugged my monitor. There's lots of pictures of Molly and her store and her amazing staff, and her beautiful goods, and the website is fun.

I think it was the crappy weather this past weekend for the Hawthorne Street Faire that sort of deflated my hot air balloon of love with Groovy Rhubarb, that I didn't get the sales and turn-out that I was hoping for and honestly, counting on for revenue for August. I was kinda blue-ish and not on fire this morning to whip up stuff. I spent an hour with Sunday's job classifieds, drinking what felt like really bitter coffee, but that was just my mood. Another gray chilly day, blah blah blechh. Where's my Muse today? Should I abandonez-vous?

Then I opened the link on CRAFTzine to Ambatalia's weekend fabric sale, and I decided to live again (with deep envy) and stay on focus with my own funky alt-business. If Molly can do it...

Belly Full of Beans

2007-08-19T11:47:00.000-07:00

Another rapturous morning moment spent in the local Garden of Eden, surveying how the midnight rain refreshed K & H's plantings. So I can be forgiven for grazing on some tender green beans while singing to cats and other Deva garden spirits? I'm keeping your Mojo going while y'all are away. There's plenty of time and many sunny days ahead to replenish your stock by the time you get back. Then I returned home to water the porch planters that were teased by the rain but got no love, and then polished off a few handfuls of gold and red cherry toms. I like this hunter-gatherer stuff. This was truly a Breakfast of Champions.

The tide has turned on this summer, it is really noticeable in the evenings now. Not being one of those folks who hungers for autumn anymore, I am hanging on to this cooler and gentler summer for dear life, the green that lasted throughout, the earth unscorched for a change. Maybe we in the Willamette Valley can slide slowly slowly into a two month Indian summer, some spicy notes, some golden hints in the trees, lots of southern sloping sunshine and crisp blue skies, liquid honey sunsets. No rains, no frosts, no permaclouds, no gray windows, not until November anyway. The tomatoes can last that long without frosts, the ones that were on their way to ripening before the sun fell away. I wish.

This year we are thinking about enclosing the porch with the kind of panels that come down in the spring, so the front porch is another room for all but the coldest winter days. Keeping the cold winds out, and letting the warming sunshine through, almost like a public house biergarten.
What else would we be doing out there in the cold? There are three home brews on the schedule---Rubus Maximus, a ruby IPA for our girl Rhubarb romping in the Elysium Fields;
Zephyr Golden Ale, beautifully clear and bright, but packs a wallop; and Bruno Bitter IPA, a dark and robust strong flavored brew with a handsome head. This Autumn will see us swimming in hoppy heaven, so if you are on your way over and hear Jimmy Buffett's live CD and people singing along to "Cheeseburger in Paradise"---you're at the wrong house. But park any where you find a space.

From my window this heavy gray bank of clouds looks like snow, as we used to say in Michigan. Coming from the coast, they look like waves and waves rolling in on the black sand. Two blocks over I can see the top of a maple tree already beginning to go gold the top three feet. This is a huge Japanese maple with small leaves that look like baby dragon feet, and it turns earlier than any other tree in the neighborhood. More accurate than a calendar, with black bark like wrought iron fingers, the tree hovers for a few days as a glowing lantern, before they all fall at once. Sure enough, it's usually the third week of September, and the other trees seem to take the cue.

Not such great weather for the Hawthorne Street Faire this weekend, however. Cool is okay, chilly and rainy is not. Dang. Lots of pedestrians the past few days, and the street renovation is officially done (fanfare) with new crosswalks that drivers still zoom through, and two more lights to snarl up 5pm traffic. I love it that the #14 is a straight shot downtown, but it takes 45 minutes during rush hour to get between downtown and 39th St or vice-versa. So let's add a few more lights...But I digress. Since the turnout at House of Vintage might not be what we all planned on, I hope once the sun returns this coming week, the newly arriving college kids needing STUFF will come here and stock up on funky with mom & dad's SUV to take it back to the pad. Forget about that Scandinavian Nightmare by the airport, don't go! Don't conform!

Keep the Local Love Happening, my brothers and sisters. Peace.

What's the Password?

2007-08-17T11:43:00.000-07:00

The phone rings, and I'm the type who thinks, 'Hmm, is there anyone I want to speak to today? No, not really,' and listen for the machine to kick on. Sorry friends of mine, but you know I'm like this and you still love me. If there were a finger of the Pacific Ocean that reached all the way into the coastline to an isolated outcropping of land, upon which clung a driftwood cottage, that would be me, Hermit Crab Woman. The sign on my front door says "Go Away!" so don't take it personally. Just because I have a phone, doesn't mean it gets to interrupt me. I even go so far as to find a great, hefty black 1940s model, my own piece of film noir, to trick myself into wanting to answer it. Funny, but the ringer doesn't work except at night between 10:30 and 11:30, when it chirps twice, but no one is there. This is a true story, and I don't want to solve the mystery.

Someone I used to work with in the bookstore keeps calling me. And I don't call her back. This sounds bad, I know.

Why not? you ask.

Lets be honest. I don't feel nostalgic for the bookstore. I don't miss everyone I worked with. I don't want to rehash all the last days of closing it down, and where is so-and-so now? Some of us have moved on, most of us, actually. But she hasn't. I'm not her boss anymore, she's not looking for a reference from me, either. She wants to dish, and remind me what she used to do for me this time of year, and how amazing and helpful she was, and how much she misses it and the gang, and weren't those the good old days, etc. She was one of the most high-maintenance employees I've had in years, and I don't feel obligated anymore to hold her hand and play nice because it's my job.
Three times she's called me, and I don't call back. I don't even want to put my mind into the space it would have to be in to have this conversation with her, even for 20 minutes. If she worked during one of my days off, she would call and leave long snarky messages just to bug me and try to make me call the store. The time is long past where I am obligated to call her back. Move on already, please!

So I'm a jerk. Delete. Lower the volume on the machine so I can't hear it from the other side of the house. Get on with my projects. Turn up the music. Decide to finally cancel the land line. I'm such a crab.

Post Script to Jasmine Trees in August

2007-08-16T15:47:00.000-07:00

Tuesday night I dreamt that I was having a little party at my house. There was music playing, and my lovely neighbors were over, and there was a large table loaded with platters of food. We had all of the windows and doors opened, and the party was spilling out onto the yard and the porch, I could smell meat cooking and wood smoke. I was happy. I looked around at all my friends, all of these wonderful people who I did not know until I moved to Portland, and just in the last few years we had entered each others' lives. We were all laughing and talking, glasses in hand, smiles and friendly faces, like a classic Woody Allen film. Here I was, in the midst of a party in which I felt completely at home, relaxed, blessed with such good people around me, genuinely enjoying myself and reflecting that I loved my life here.

The doorbell rang. Which was odd, because everyone was just walking in casually, calling hello and coming into the center of the house with bottles of wine and dishes to pass. Who would stand on ceremony and ring the bell, staying outside?

I walked through the groups of friends chatting and eating, picking my way from the back to the front of the house and into the vestibule. The wooden door was open, but the screen door was not. Standing there on the porch with a timid smile and sparkling eyes, a mohair shawl around her statuesque shoulders, was my sister-friend, looking very much as she did 20 years ago, rounder, warmer, and with beaded cornrows in her thick chesnut hair. We hugged for what seemed like hours, standing there in the doorway, and it just felt so healing to my heart, that she was back in my life. The way she was before, during those early years we were so fierce and loyal, to the death and beyond, always seeing the grace and the beauty. In my ear she said, "Are you glad that I came?" and I just let the tears roll down onto her shoulder and held her tighter.

Jasmine Trees In August

2007-08-14T09:23:00.000-07:00

It stops me in my tracks, transfixed and speechless. I wait for the full depth and complexity of the perfume to take hold, a split second of timelessness that unlocks so much from my heart. Sometimes I tear up, other times I smile with eyes half-closed, but I always stop whatever I'm doing and wait for the moment to fully bloom and then fade to merely a fragrance again. Looking around, I locate the Jasmine tree and make a mental note of who's yard it's in, how far it is from where I live and where I was going, and if the tree is a magnificent specimen or a parking strip treasure. Usually I continue on with what I was doing, although a little distracted.

Naturally there's a story with this, and since it has many layers, I am still loosening the knots of it and trying to see the larger pattern and beauty of it, and my part in it, good and bad. Taking a deep breath, I almost want to start by saying, "Once upon a time---" again, the people taking on archetypal roles, our behavior now mythical, our failures tragedies. And it would all be true, but my usual tactic, so I won't paint the larger than life mural story, surrounded with Jasmine trees.

When I first moved to Portland, I stayed at some friends' house for a few days before my stuff from Florida arrived and I moved into my apartment. They had this huge leafy tree shading their house in their neighbors' yard, and it was just beginning to flower. The tree kept their house cool all summer long, and then in August, bloomed profusely with little star-shaped flowers that smelled like your Auntie's jasmine perfume from long ago. I took this as a magical sign of the rightness of my decision to relocate here, jasmine being one of my absolute favorites.
An entire tree, just casually blooming in the heat of summer, not spring, and making a cool lazy sanctuary of my friends' bungalow, where I spent hours and hours that first month just getting my head around the idea I was actually here, in Portland. On the Pacific Ocean side of the country. Everything about that first month here, in August 2000, in that house with those two people, is carried along by the perfume of that tree in my mind. Having meals with them after work, sitting on the back deck in the long evenings talking in the dark, taking refuge from the sun and heat on a Saturday afternoon with all the windows open and the wind chimes playing, talking and laughing and loving every moment of being there, being here, finally. I truly believed it would stay that way, and would never ever be any different.

That's why the perfume overtakes me on the street, I'm flooded with all of this, all at once.

Because everything changed, of course. And I'm still making sense of it. I think there was one pivotal moment, for me anyway, but there were a few years of bewilderment and uncertainty when I put my best face forward when I saw them, and tried to figure out what was going wrong. My friends split up, sort of, and I worked too much, and the commute was way too long, and I was stressed over money and store politics, and she moved further away, and and and...
It all came apart. Almost 25 years in, everything unraveled. My heart was broken and I grieved for a long time. Work more, feel less. Finally this past winter, even that structure was broken beyond repair.

This summer I feel her absence in a way that I didn't allow myself to before. I wish she could see my life now, what I am now, how I live now. This is how she always envisioned me living before, all those years we were sisters and best friends, and I was scared to death to be an artist. She knew I could do it, and that is a comfort to me these days, like the Jasmine trees in August and the smell of antique roses and timber creaking in the hot sunshine. She was the main reason I came out here, and that is her greatest gift to me.

Last week I drove past the house and slowed way down. There it was, nothing changed, and the Jasmine tree shading half the neighborhood and looking so majestic, the canopy over 50ft tall. The windows in her old room were open, and I could see the same pale green paint on the edge of the wall.

You can be in two places at the same time.

Maybe I Need a Truck

2007-08-13T14:46:00.001-07:00

(so many topics for this picture, thanks U-Handbag!)

Da-da-da-DAH!! Groovy Rhubarb is my new occupation, and I even considered ending the blog, because the 6 months of post-Borders life is behind me now, and that's how I started writing here. Re-inventing myself, the dreaded Mid-Life Crisis, dumped for a younger business plan, etc. Boo-hoo.

But, this is the first stage of this whole process, I think, and it now has little bearing on Borders, or bookstores, or being a manager. Publishers' Weekly online reported the 6 month straight decline in bookstores' sales for 2007, and 2006 was not great. My former industry is undergoing some ruthless anorexia nervosa right now, will they survive? I think I got out at just the right time, and would be dancing on eggs right now if still running my old store. So I'm trotting my extensive skill-set on to this newly hatched project, and we're going to fire the second stage booster rockets and leave orbit. The Hawthorne Street Faire is this coming weekend, and we'll have great weather and mid-80s temperatures, so lots of foot traffic. I want to sell insane amounts of stuff, and charge ahead into September in the black already. (should be sewing, not writing, dang!)

One of the great archive pieces of my overland migration was hauled to the booth today, my 1880's domed-lid steamer trunk, that I've had since high school, and am wanting to be free of it.
It's emblematic of the clinging to the past, the stockpiling of treasures, antique ideas needing airing, and besides, I can barely move it by myself anymore. Someone will give it a good home and take over from me as the New World guardian of this sturdy wooden chest, and I can look forward, into the light wood of my future. It doesn't need to be Ikea, it can be Mid-Century teak or birch, whatever. My old trunk would make a great scary Halloween prop for a haunted house business (hint hint hint) and you could re-sell it afterwards! Wow, smashing idea!!

There's a seductive stack of freshly washed linen tablecloths whispering to me and I must go. The sink of dishes is trying to get a work in edgewise, but my hearing is selective today, in spite of the aroma of Mrs. Meyers' lemon verbena, one of my favorites. And that new Martha mag arrived in the mail this morning...hmmmm. NO. Load the bobbins and grab those scissors, girl.
Time to make money.

The Midnight Lab

2007-08-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

No, this isn't a cute dog story---

To facilitate sleep, it's great to have a bit of a routine. The dimming of lights, comfortable nightwear, lower activity, no big meals, a bad book or bad television, the usual. A nightcap? Sure.

Off we all go to Dreamland.

Or not.

There is the phenomenon of The Midnight Lab. As in Laboratory, factory, sweatshop, workhouse.

I think most of us are sleeping by this point, and the Night Shift carries on without us supervising it. Brain wheels whirling, obelisks raised, bridges erected, hammers slamming down, neuro-chimmneys steaming ideas into the contained holy of holies in your head. We dream through this most of the time, transforming back into the child without a care, weightlessly embraced by a hammock of oblivion. Oops, surfacing, gotta pee. Resume position and continue until morning.

I know about insomnia and the Tilt-o-Worry-Whirl, that's different than this. What I'm finding out is that my Midnight Lab requires more attention from me before it will shift into cruise control for the night. It reminds me of closing a large retail store, and needing to change the download back-up tapes in the refrigerated computer room before going home by midnight.
My inventing mind wants 30 minutes of my attention before lights out to download the newest brainstorms, make a few sketches or diagrams, make a ToDo list for tomorrow, put the wild ideas down on paper, capture the inspirations before rebooting in the morning. And the last few months, I will have to turn the light back on after two hours of not-sleeping when I don't take the notebook to bed with me.

You'd think I'd quit resisting and just do it, but no.

Last night it was the same again, so I thought this morning I would share it with you. And it's only occasionally flashes of brilliance, like ideas of time and space expansion, or the mass of light particles. (I'm not telling, so don't ask) Often, it's a cute bag handle idea, or a logo design for someone I know, or a lino cut I want to make, or a new duvet cover with vintage tablecloths, or how to rearrange my studio for better efficiency, or how to finally get the community garden in Steven's front yard idea going, how to build cabinets with the rough pine shelving racks from Fred Meyers as the base structure(with cut-outs). It goes on like this for pages, usually around one page a night, sometimes more. It often includes diagrams, which is why I think of it like a Lab, pages and pages of experiment ideas, A to B to C to D, on and on.

Then I can turn the light out again, and glide into the slipstream.
Writing in the morning can follow if the dreams were interesting and I remember them fairly easily, but I've already gone into that before.

Are you in touch with your Midnight Lab? Do you out-source? Is yours a Salon of sparkling characters, or a Cinema of Surrealism? What would your dogs or cats say? Think it over.

Breakfast with Zephyr

2007-08-08T11:20:00.000-07:00

There's a warm and cozy trend lately of posting mouth-watering pictures of your daily breakfast on your blog, or having that be your entire blog content, or a weekly feature and educational snicket (halloumi, how have I lived my whole life without it?).

I don't have a picture of the contents of this morning's breakfast, that may follow some other day with more sunshine and before I have actually eaten it. But what I can tell you about is the delight in coming down the stairs and onto the porch in the morning, sitting on the porch stairs, and having coffee and well-buttered sourdough toast with m'girl Zephyr Golden.

We sit and she listens as I sing meaningless lyrics to her, then she purrs and starts her morning bathing, and we greet the neighbors and their dogs as they pass by. Recently, we were gifted with a snug gold velour armchair, and it has become Zephyr's porch perch, and frequently she sleeps the night in it. This makes an early breakfast with her easy to manage before our hectic schedules carry us off the porch and out into our busy day. The chair also makes a impetuous afternoon snooze very stealthy, when she allows me to nap with her on my lap as she curls up to sleep. We dream wonderful summer afternoon porch dreams, with the warm breeze carrying us over the hydrangeas and Japanese maples, over the bungalow eyebrow roofs, beyond the giant jasmine tree just beginning it's siren song of perfume, to the enchanted bamboo groves where there are endless shadowy paths to explore. We move silently through the slender fronds of black bamboo, arching to become invisible, creeping low to be silent, then folding to sit and watch and wait. For the right time.

Zephyr always sniffs the cafe au lait to determine it's variety (ethiopian) and that the milk is organic, but she's not a coffee drinker. She prefers organic butter to lick off the Portland Sour-dough Wheat toast, but about that she is not as picky. I usually have Yoplait vanilla custard yogurt, and that, as all cats know, is really inferior and too sweet. She returns to her hind leg grooming.

This morning we had another visit from our friendly neighbor dog, who had rushed Zephyr off the porch yesterday morning. This time, the little white dog only came up the first two steps to say 'hi' to me, and didn't press her luck with Zephyr "Hellbeast" Golden. Harmony was maintained, no one got hurt or lost face. By then, we were done noshing, and it was time to get to work. She makes her neighborhood inspections (someone has to do it) and I go back inside and fire up the sewing machine/computer/paper cutter/glue gun/knitting machine/printer and think about tomatoes.

Same time tomorrow, m'girl.

Houston? Hello, Houston? Are you there Houston?

2007-08-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

There's the weird phone message from the inside of someone's car, and the beginning is scrambled and incomprehensible. Who would call me from inside their car with a speaker phone---OnStar, oh, it's Betty, naturally. She has the 500 free minutes to burn inside her Cadillac.

She's on her way to dinner with my brother after playing computer Geeks all afternoon, and she's calling to let me know they are canceling all the arrangements we agreed on during the four hours a day hand-holding calls I had with her and the new laptop last week, and I get to hear where they're going to eat, and how far it is from main roads I don't even know the names of in her town, and I realize it's the minutes burning that's the thrill for her at that moment. And I really hope she's not the one driving the yacht while chatting. You can imagine.

I had to go out to the porch and sit for a spell. It was all just too much for me.

She defers to men every frickin' time, it never fails. I've built computers, used them for years, know her better than anyone on earth, and will sit (no longer) and talk her down for hours to get her aimed in the direction I know she needs to wind up in, and will wind up happiest in. Then she does a 180 because she talked to some guy for 15 minutes, and obviously he's the expert.

And will she call the guy when she's frustrated at how her progress and situation is lagging behind and she's impatient for the faster system, the zippier program, the instant results???

No. She'll call me.

Help.

So, after sending her a snooty email yesterday after coming back inside from the porch, I sent her a nice white picket fence and garden path email today, like the snooty email never happened, and went on and on and on about me. I have to chuckle at that, she has a-ways to catch up on her typing, and her emails so far have been 1 or 2 sentences. Heh heh heh. She now knows more about the health and growing habits of my tomatoes than anyone should ever have to endure. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! And the domestic dramas of my neighbors, including dialogue and how many police cars showed up, and which cops were cute, and what kind of pen they used and how short the night shirt was, and and and... Mwah-ha-har-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!

My brother-----you are Officially tagged IT.

Gotta fly!!

Betty Crashes on Planet Dell

2007-08-03T12:29:00.000-07:00

My 68 year old mother just got a computer.

After years of nagging her to get one, I may have been wrong-headed.

Most of Wednesday and Thursday of this week has been spent on the phone with her in Florida talking her out of the tree she ran herself into when the Dell boxes arrived. We literally had to begin with, "Okay mom, open the boxes," and I kept speaking very calmly and slowly.

Somehow, I had assumed that with her many part time jobs over the last ten years, she'd come into contact with Windows and basic computer operating experience, maybe even created a few documents in Word, and she certainly did alot of computer cashiering. Didn't most of us learn the basics at work or for school? Those of us over 35, I mean?

Honestly, I had so much compassion for her, she was ready to chuck it all off the condo balcony, and refused to pour herself a glass of wine to regroup. "No, I need a clear head for this nonsense, I'm so out of my element as it is," so I didn't make fun of her. But I was astounded.

BTW, the Dell people could put more in the way of an Owners Welcome Package in the top of the box for the other newly brave computer buyers to orient themselves. No wonder the various Geek Squads are doing so well. And don't pack all the power cords in with the printer box, pack the laptop adapter and cords in with the laptop, sheesh. We had 10 minutes of freak out because she swore there were no cords for this thing. Her shiny new laptop came with Windows Vista Home Premium, and her icon flags are different than my old XP Professional, and the frustration was dangerously mounting.
"I'm just going to shut it off and deal with this another day," she said after we finally got it fired up.
"NO, LEAVE IT ON!" I came at her through the phone. "Then you'll just walk by it everyday and dread starting this again,and weeks will go by ---we're doing this today!"
Big sigh from her. "You're right, that's just what would happen, and you'll never want to answer your phone again, thinking it's me with this stupid thing again, so okay, now what?"

Thursday we were haggling about dial up, DSL, broadband & WiFi, calling my brother to drive over and help her, how rude the Dell support guy was and how she couldn't understand a thing he said and how much he made fun of her, couldn't I fly there to just take care of all this and the eBay store thing, too? Plus, she needs a digital camera, and what's a megapixel?

"You know, I've never sent an email in my life," she finally confessed.

"You said you had done all the notifying of customers at the store about orders being received, repairs completed, you mean you weren't emailing people?"

"Why would I go through all that when I can just pick up the phone?"

My head is in my hands at this point. What have I done? Unleashed her into the world with a loaded gun?

My five year old Sony Vaio is still overheating along, whirring and inconsistently recognizing the CD/DVD-ROM drive, low RAM, crappy graphics capability, and I'm stuck with it for now. And here's mom, driving a Porsche laptop in comparison, and doesn't even know how to start the engine. I could cry. I realized I couldn't help her from here, the parts of my advice she actually listened to she wasn't doing anyway, so I told her to make an appointment with the Geek Squad and tell them she needs the DSL kit in a box along with their technical support to install it, and at least an hour scheduled to show her around Vista.

"I wish you were here to just do this!" she snapped.

"I wish I had the brand new laptop and you had my old one to punch keys randomly on," I replied wistfully.

"Why would I bother to go through all this with a five year old computer, someone's cast-off?"

I didn't say anything. I'm a smart kid.

Gemutlichkeit

2007-07-31T19:34:00.000-07:00

Taking a break from the number crunching...

One of my favorite blogs is Poppalina, in the now wintery land Down Under. She's a woman named Shula that I've mentioned on my blog many times, and I check her every day. She doesn't post four times a day, but that's about how many times I check to see if she has. So we inadvertently drive up each other's hit counters. (I don't have one, too early in the game) Shula has been doing this serious yoga-mama thing, becoming a yoga teaching person, and it sounds grueling. Oh, and she's a single mum with a 13 year old girl. Sounds like someone else I know...

Anyway, today Shula stayed on her blog long enough to tell us she finished writing a paper for her class, and she found a great flash pic saying, "It's Bloody Finished!" in Broadway Lights. We all sent up a cheer. She hates paper writing, and does all the dodging activities I do when the paperwork is deadline due.

So I'm not going to apologize for posting twee pictures on Friday, being in a hands-on, visual mode, left brain off. Today was all left brain; finances, numbers and applications, accounting of new efforts with dollar signs attached, profit dollars, blessed expenses, supplies, bills old and new and real old, and looking down the short handle of the end of unemployment.

Finally finished doing what I needed to do for Etsy and Paypal, and am waiting until tomorrow to hit House of Vintage. I'm grimacing cautiously as I write this. August will pick up, college kids renting and needing to fill apartments, houses and closets. Cautiously, I'm thinking all I really want to do is Groovy Rhubarb, throw my whole body and soul into it, get it high off the ground and then Etsy will kick in. Donations accepted. Ideas and gentle advice welcomed. It's all so clear to me, I can hear it breathing, ready to fly.

Numbers being what they are, GR has some legs, not real long now, but...it took me until May to realize what I was going to do, then the entire concept came together really fast. I'm suddenly the only boss I'm willing to work that hard for. Am I just crazy? I believe in this project with everything I have, and it's kinda lonely out here. Oh well, that's not enough to stop me yet.

Speaking with someone Financial lately, he said to me that what I'm in the midst of is usually what people 20 years younger or older than me do, I should really be focused on building security. But he has to say that, that's what I made the appointment with him for. He was kind, and didn't completely discourage me, and made a comment about the entrepreneurial personality type, being strong-headed, and clear of vision. Sometimes a girl has to write a check for some fatherly advice and effortless money computation. He shook my hand and wished me luck and I almost cried. I'm bad that way. Then I came home to get the mail, and found a totally unexpected check from my car insurance company, nothing in the 100s, but a delight nonetheless. Thank you. Thinking of my stern German grandfather, I jumped in the car and drove to the Bavarian deli, off of Powell by the Aladdin Theater, called Edelweiss, and got some wursts, sauerkraut and horseradish, and black rye bread and made our Bavarian family stand-by meal. Sometimes you just have to do that, bring yourself all the way around to home.

Fortified with gemutlichkeit and weisswurst, I dove into the numbers, thinking of my grandpa and the lecture on practicality I would be getting if he were still alive and leaning over these papers. So I had a beer. Prost!

Short and Very Very Sweet

2007-07-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

l to r, top to bottom:

pimped-out book cart
Molly Doll
Spiral by Andrew
Bea's Clown (toile)
Fishin' Clown (toile)
Shula's napdog
Jewels on Etsy
Hello Kitty sewing machine at Target
Felt Gateaux by Softies

Either Writing, or Not-Writing

2007-07-25T16:19:00.000-07:00

Being so impressionable, I must admit to a certain ennui about blogging when my bookmarked list of favorite bloggers are not posting, thinking, "Wow, we of similar genius and brilliance must all be on the same no-blog-today page, and I didn't even get the memo---cool."

And, NO, I am not reading that dreaded doorstopper of a book that just came out which shall remain title-less in this space. Ee-gads, perish the thought!

I have been reading, and not magazines, some titles I found through our esteemed Multnomah County Library system, on Hollywood before the Decency Codes were enacted, pre-1938 films.
There is "Complicated Women" featuring the amazing sirens of the time, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Kay Francis, Norma Shearer, Louise Brooks, Clara Bow, Joan Blondell, Jean Harlow, even Loretta Young and Myrna Loy. There's another title I am waiting to be returned, about the male actors in this pre-code era, and another one with huge photographs called, "Sin in Soft Focus" putting it all together. I can blame this all on finally getting the cable package with Turner Classic Movies, where you can start in the 1930s and not emerge until sometime the next day. So it has compelled me to begin reading again, perhaps finally warming up enough to read the new non-fiction Barbara Kingsolver book, "Animal Vegetable Miracle," the new novel "The Blood of Roses" about a young girl in Afghanistan (I think) who makes carpets, and another book on the new physics wave/particle field emanations theory. Summer will be over shortly.

Tomatoes have begun coming in, the SunGold and the SunSugar cherry toms, bright orange when fully ripe, and so sweet they are barely a vegetable, more like a tiny plum. The heat two weeks ago was great for the toms, but wiped out my marigolds and forced them to seed and they died all at once. Scattering seeds where the parent plant expired will hopefully return a few sprouts before November and frost, plus I replaced a few because I missed the sunny globes on the porch step planters. How can basil die so easily? Just a few days of heat, they were watered every day---I may have to cheat and buy a few big plants like I did last year from Trader Joe's. I was eating peas from my neighbors' garden this morning, and they said the patch was done for the summer. Ha! Before they left town, that is. And the pods are tender and as edible as the peas inside. Now, about the three ripe figs about to fall off the fig tree, purple as black grapes and soft---might have to bring those home. They have about 200 new green ones on their way to ripe, they won't miss these. Fig leaves, all jokes aside, are actually very elegant and beautiful, I'd never seen a real one so closely before, what a great woodcut or rubbing it would make. All jokes aside.

This is a week almost every year that I would have taken for vacation time from the store. I believe there was almost an unacknowledged agreement with myself about the bookends of February 1st--- being the first date of being jobless and also the announcement of the release of the 7th and final volume of that dreaded book, that would be occurring with accompanying frenzy on--- July 21st. A weird kind of stasis, purgatory-lite, now that That Book is out and done, not worked through like the past ten years of my work life (paperbacks, remember!) I feel absolutely free of it. A big book retail ritual that I missed completely! Imagine what being on the other side of a book retail Holiday Season will feel like? Giddiness is overtaking me. Kind of like when ending a relationship, just getting through the first set of holidays by marking little anniversaries, you really begin to let go for real. Two years on, you don't even remember to remember. Usually.