June 2007
I Have Nothing
Meeting People
I met my upstairs neighbors last night. I’d been calling them Mr. and Mrs. Stompy, due to their penchant for stomping around. But their names are actually Kara and Clark. Kara and Clark Stompy. (Actually, they seem very nice–they admired my patio garden. And they don’t mind the cuckoo clock, which is loud enough to scare quail outside.)
Okay, Maybe It Is Just Like "Little House On The Prairie"
While I take offense at people thinking my hobbies are pioneer-like, I was cutting out the latest blouse Friday night and had a flash. And the flash had to do with Laura Ingalls Wilder.
I was working with very, very nice cotton lawn. Cotton lawn is lightweight, tightly woven, and very crisp. It’s so lightweight it felt like I wasn’t cutting through anything while I was cutting out pattern pieces. I was being careful to line up the pattern pieces, and enjoying the fabric, and admiring the print (pink and purple at the same time!) when I thought, “Wait a minute…something’s familiar here–oh my God, I’m in a passage from a Little House on the Prairie book.”
For Laura’s summer dress they bought ten yards of delicate pink lawn…The lawn was so crisp and fresh, the colors so dainty, that Laura was afraid to cut it lest she made a mistake, but Ma had made so many dresses she did not hesitate. She took Laura’s measurements; then, with her dressmaker chart, she made the pattern for the waist, and fearlessly cut the lawn.
So maybe I should just EMBRACE my inner Laura after all. At least the finished blouse will look more like a little girl’s smock from 1968 than a shirtwaist from 1890. (I think that’s a good thing.)
And did you catch the part in the quote about Ma MAKING the pattern? Not only were there no sewing machines in 1890, you had to know pattern drafting, too.
Friday Unrelated Information
1. Check out this Time photo essay (via Boing Boing): Families from around the world posed with the food they eat in one week. Sobering: The family in the refugee camp in the first photo.
2. Okay, that’s enough sober thought about world hunger. On to crafts! It may be a two-project weekend. I’m close to finishing the embroidered-pocket top and have a second blouse ready to go. We’ll see.
3. And more news off BoingBoing: I found this interview with Ray Bradbury from the Los Angeles Times this week, in which he says Fahrenheit 451 was never about censorship, but about TV taking over people’s lives. And of all people, he would know what his book is about.
I Have No Goals. But I Have Books.
My newest find on the internet is personal finance sites. The advice they give is alternately inspirational (if I can save $20 a month now, I won’t have to eat cat food when I retire!) and terrifying (oh my God, I have no emergency fund!). But the real blow was not this quote: “If you think it’s hard to make ends meet now, try doing it when you’re old and sick.” No, sobering as that was, the real blow was being told in an article to make a life map.
The idea behind a life map is to start with long-term goals, then find shorter- and still shorter-term steps to reach them, so you have a meaning and purpose to your savings plan. The article suggests starting with your name and then attaching your biggest goals to it, working outwards in a sort of spiderweb, with the shortest-term goals on the outside leading into the main goals on the inside.
“Cool,” I thought. “A life map. I’ll do that.” But then I discovered I have nothing to put on my map.
Seriously. Three things floated through my head. Three. They were, in order:
1. Own an alpaca ranch in a place that’s kind of like Hawaii and kind of like Castle Valley.
2. Go to the Cook Islands.
3. Win the National Book Award before I’m sixty. (I only write if there’s a deadline. Therefore, sixty.)
Now, you may argue that these are indeed goals. If I can save and invest, yes, I could get a ranch. And even go to the Cook Islands. (More about writing coming up.) But what about things like changing the world, spiritual growth, home ownership, even having a family? The life map example used “being a good parent” as one of the primary goals. I suppose it’s a mercy that didn’t cross my mind, because I suspect having a relationship last for more than three months should come before wanting to be a good parent, and I haven’t even managed that yet.
As for being a writer, it’s the one thing in my life I’ve always felt I could do. But then I go and read All The Pretty Horses (which won the National Book Award) again after realizing I have lame goals for my life map and think, “Just abandon all of them now, including the Book Award one. Because you will never, ever, be as good as this guy.” Case in point:
“They rode out along the fencline and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumpsect, like theives newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.”
Reading that passage, I can’t imagine coming up with anything remotely as good, ever. But, reading that passage, I don’t care about goals, or my own talent, or anything else. I just want to keep reading.
So if I end up homeless from not having parenting goals that would motivate me to make a savings plan, I’ll hang out at the library.
Honeysuckle
Best Packaging Ever
A friend gave me a bag of Lion Coffee (“The King Of Coffees”) on Sunday, which she had brought from Hawaii. I had no idea Hawaii had a fairly famous coffee brand, let alone a fairly famous coffee brand with awesome packaging!
Not only is there a lion wearing a sailor hat, the lion has EYEBROWS. And there are coffee beans in grass skirts DANCING THE HULA above him. Even better, the text, which you probably can’t make out, says both “The cup that cheers” and “A Century of Wisdom In Every Roast!”.
My own bag is of Kona Organic, which I had with pineapple rice pudding this morning, while admiring the delight that is the Lion Coffee packaging.
(Incidentally, I’ve been on a vaguely tropical food kick–the rice pudding, coconut cheesecake, pineapple salsa, sangria, etc. I think part of me is hoping that eating the food of sunny climates will help me get tan.)
Best Packaging Ever
Have You Any Wool?
Saturday was shearing day at Blue Moon Ranch!
It started with getting alpacas into the barn.
Then they were wrangled into the shearing station, where they couldn’t kick or squirm and get accidentally cut.
Alpacas spit when they’re mad or scared. Shearing makes them mad AND scared, so there was a lot of spitting. So much spitting, in fact, some of them got a sock as a temporary spit shield.
My job wasn’t so spitty: I got to label and bag the fleece after it was off the animal.
In spite of the spit and the scared alpaca noises, after it was done, they seemed fine. Just much smaller.