her able hands

I had a stomach thing going on yesterday so kept myself at home so I wouldn’t pass it on. It’s running (pun intended) through Lila’s school for two weeks now and Chris came home last night with it as well. I was mild, and actually thought I might get my house kind of prepared for my brother’s arrival this Saturday. But instead I spent most of the day trying to work out computer/technical difficulties.

My Airport Express that’s only 3 weeks old went kaput after I configured Ty’s computer for wireless. It restarted itself and then I spent the rest of the day trying to get either computer to recognize the device. Several hours of phone calls to the tech support department at MacMall where I purchased all of the new equipment — where a young man named Arin or Aaron or Erin put me through my paces connecting the thing directly to my macbook via every outlet in our house, and using three different ethernet cables. He came to the conclusion that the hardware failed so I get to send it back and order another one.

I also tried hooking up my 20″ Apple cinema display to my macbook using the huge frakking adapter that cost $100 because Apple decided to stop providing ADC plugs on their macs in total disregard for the many people who spent way too much cash on their gorgeous cinema displays that have ADC plugs. Nice. And no, it didn’t work either.

So yesterday was a day of tummy aches and headaches and low productivity. I have a big bruise on my forehead and a dent in the wall. I did however, manage to get the kitchen cleaned up before I dragged myself to the evening yoga class and I’m so happy I did that — I’m sure it helped me sleep (both the clean kitchen and the hour and a half of yoga). Even if I did dream of adapters and routers and a tangle of wires at my feet.

I know all of this stuff is solvable, but I’m sick of throwing money at it and having nothing work properly. Is the universe telling me to go analog? Tempting. I’m obviously stymied by the blog right now. It’s all surface material and no depth. Sigh.

First of all, thank you so much for your thoughtful comments on my last post. Much food for thought, particularly in Joe’s comment. It’s interesting that Joe picked up on the Tyler aspect of the post because that’s the part that I most wanted to write more about, but I stopped doing the mommy blog thing for a reason. I felt like I crossed the line saying anything at all. But now I want to follow up on a few of those thoughts. But that’s for another day after I let it percolate a little bit more. Today I’m thinking more about my blog as a whole.

For a couple of months now, I’ve been annoyed by the fact that most of what I write about, I’ve written about before, and how I’m so very bored with my bloggy self. Then yesterday I read Becca’s post about blogging in time and the challenges for a long-term blogger to make the cyclical nature of things work well.

Time goes forward–2008, 2009, 2010–but it also cycles–spring, summer, winter, fall, spring, 4/16/08, 4/16/09, 4/16/10. That’s the beauty of it. Blogs are essentially temporal: the two things that make a blog a blog are the computer and time as the organizing structure of the post. The topical blogger and the narrative blogger can, I think, take better advantage of this nexus of the progressive and the cyclical. [emphasis mine]

That last line has popped into my head a thousand times as I wonder just how I can take better advantage of that in my own narrative efforts. Each season rolls around again and the idea is to record the progress, both internal and external. What’s happening in the gardens, in the kitchen, with the family, inside of me. What new ideas we’re playing around with in our heads and in our hearts. But I so often now feel as if I’ve already said it all, or that there’s no new way to say it to make it a slightly different story.

I don’t want to stop blogging, but I do think I’ll be posting less story over the next few weeks and working on some photography instead. Things are shifting here and I don’t feel the need to write about any of it. Quite the opposite. I feel the need to hold it inside and keep my attention on the vision of this new life unfolding. To stay in action as much as possible during the transition because I have so very many balls in the air, or pots on the stove, or seeds in the soil. Actually, I’m managing all of these things while working full-time and it’s a little crazy-making. It’s also short-term, I can really feel that. I think looking at it all through the lens may help clarify my vision some, and give me a chance to learn a bit more about this camera I’ve been toting around for three years and still only using the automatic settings.

So let’s end out this gorgeous week (goodness this weather has been spectacular!) with a little list love, and then I have to go make lunches and get us all up and out the door so I can go hang out in the cubicle farm for another eight hours. (I take a break every half hour to close my eyes, breathe deep into my body and see this other life in action—this life of working with food and gardens and people.)

• The squirrels did not, in fact, dig up all of my Fava Beans and Peas. They’re almost all up about an inch now, and I have a newfound hope for the harvest this season.

• My peppers and eggplant are finally beginning to poke through the starter mix after 22 days. I really need to seal off the light stand with some plastic to create more of a heated room in there.

• Three bags of plant splittings that Cheril gave me in the late fall somehow survived the winter, even though they spent it sitting out in plastic grocery bags. They now have new homes in the perennial bed. I have no idea what they are.

• Turnips, radish, arugula, spinach and chard are all up.

• I forgot to take the lids off of my winter sowing containers on Tuesday and fried most of the seedlings. Hand smack to forehead. So much for my masses of Lupine and Delphinium. Boo.

• I have a couple of people who want to buy vegetables from me this year. I’ll make no guarantees on quantity, but will be good practice to get the succession planting schedule in rhythm.

• My brother is considering coming to Kent State to do his graduate studies in ceramics. I know! I might actually have family I understand in town with me in a year. Holy mackerel, Andy. I need to not get too excited about that one because he also might be going to Osaka Japan to apprentice with a master potter. His future is wide open, as Mr. Petty would say.

• Last night my neighbor asked me if I’m pregnant. That’s two people in two months. I really am going to need to learn to chew and spit when testing cupcake recipes. And make time to get vigorous exercise in every day again. And do about five thousand crunches a day, to boot.

• And tell Chris to not bring home any more Corona. No matter how warm it gets out, I need to step away from the icy cold beer.

Happy Friday peeps…here comes another weekend. What’s on your plate?

Can I get an amen and a hell yeah?!

I didn’t sleep in too long, up by 7:15 to pay some bills and get thinking on the week’s menu/shopping list. A small pot of oats is simmering on the stove with chopped almonds. I’ll add blueberries from the freezer and a spot of the last container of maple syrup from the farmers’ market. Listening to the Into the Wild soundtrack on itunes and letting some ideas percolate. They’re loosely connected bits and I’m going to toss them up here so I won’t lose them in one of my twenty three notebooks.

I’m working my way through Derrick Jensen’s books and enjoying the hell out of the conversational tone and the balls-out pronouncements about how unsustainable our society and culture are by their very nature. At the same time, he weaves a thread of light and love for relationships, for the shrinking populations of creatures on the planet and for the land on which we all play out our lives, throughout the work. I’ve read a lot of gurus works on kindness, empathy, compassion, being here now and they all had this backdrop of hope that I just don’t feel. The world has felt hopeless to me for as long as I can remember. I’m not calling Derrick a guru, I’m just noticing the level of consciousness he has in his writing and one can presume in his living. He doesn’t talk about hope for the future. I’m reading and questions arise. Some asked directly, as in: “How do you want to live?” Well, free, of course. Then he shows me how much of a pipe dream and illusion my ideas of freedom are—how we’re all caught in the mouse trap of our culture.

Yet, there are all of these stories of human connection that are used as examples of teaching and learning. He never comes out and says “Hey! Loving each other is the way.” But the spark in his writing lights up these examples of him experiencing or facilitating or witnessing his or another person’s moments of awakening. It makes me want to be more awake. It makes me realize just how far off the path of critical thinking I have wandered in my pursuit of a comfortable lifestyle. Would you believe me if I told you that in recent weeks I have felt areas of my brain tingling? Spots on top and in the back of my head that I wouldn’t have any awareness of unless I cracked my skull on an open cabinet door or on the door frame of the truck while lifting out sacks of groceries. But it’s not the surface, it’s way inside, this tingling. Interesting that I’m reading these books while detoxing and cutting out sugar. It feels as if a layer of sludge has peeled away and I can see myself and my surroundings more in focus. No idea what it all means other than recognizing that I’ve been hibernating for a long time and that waking up feels terrifyingly fantastic.

Dang, this oatmeal is delicious.

So my cast-iron Lodge wok finally arrived. Jeeze-oh-man, it took three weeks. See? I’m such an American. I almost left negative feedback on Amazon, but really, I got free shipping and when I contacted the company two days after the projected delivery date to ask for an ETA, they wrote back to say that they were waiting for a shipment and would send it out as soon as they had it on hand. And I thought to myself, well, I should have bought it direct from the manufacturer or sourced it in a local store instead of trying to save seven bucks. And providing the machine with more information about my habits.

My credit card statement arrived the other day and while I did quite a lot of Etsy purchasing for the holidays, I still managed to rack up some serious amazon mailings. While looking the statement over for inaccuracies, I noticed a credit at the top of the month from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now, I had never noticed a charge from them and haven’t subscribed since we lived in the old house. Looking at that $5.75 credit, I saw this vast web of connected threads of digital information about me running all over the country criss-crossing with the same kinds of threads belonging to (no, not belonging to, but about) most of the other people in this country. The information belongs to corporations and the government. And I give it away every day.

But hey, I’ve only had one cup of coffee and I’m not ready for quite that much awareness this morning. Baby steps and all that bullshit.

So! A wok—seasoned cast iron with loop handles and deep enough to fry if I’m feeling like saturated fat is the way to go! My big Teflon coated Calphalon sauté pan is going out to the garage for Chris to use sorting parts while he rebuilds that motor for the Datsun. Dinner tonight? Stir fry!

Oh, and Cheril gave me a great faux snake skin covered journal that has lined pages on one side and blank on the other. I’m going to use it for a garden journal. The only real notes I kept last year were on this blog, and while it’s nice to know it’s recorded somewhere, it wasn’t very well organized and is beyond impractical to try to extract the facts from the narrative. I’ll use the blank pages for sketches and charts and the lined pages for notes.

Our stocking-exchange dinner at the local bistro was yum, but the rich food gave me a bit of a belly ache. We finished off the meal of shared appetizers and salads with a vanilla crème brûlée. The custard was a little more pudding-like than I prefer, but the burnt sugar was spiced with cardamom and topped with a few fresh blueberries. The combination? Sublime. I need to do some sort of dessert with cardamom and blueberries. After I’ve lost this baked goods belly and have strengthened my self-control muscles enough to have just a taste instead of emotionally stuffing my face with half a cake, one sliver at a time on the sly, over the course of a Sunday afternoon.

And now on to the question. Tell me…who or what is informing your thinking today?

There have been so many moments in recent weeks that I wanted to savor. To have last long enough that I could weave some spell and turn them into trinkets to tuck away in a pocket and bring home where I could then take them out and hold them gently in my warm hands and feel their pulse and vitality. Life is flying past so quickly and I can hardly click the shutter down on my own thoughts. Though I try, I really do.

But I’m also feeling slow and tired and only just a little bit recovered from getting so sick. I get home from work, make dinner and then try to remember all of the lovely little things I thought of over the day. Things I want to share with you. Things that made me laugh or made me think just a little bit harder about how I am in the world. The speeding world.

Evening isn’t my best time for writing. I’m looking at the clock inching its way towards 8 pm right now and thinking little hurry up thoughts to myself. Little type faster thoughts. Because just below the surface of all of the other thoughts and ideas that clamor for my attention is the constant, beckoning thrum of the dream-time. All I want to do is sleep. I think all day about climbing onto my high king mattress and pulling the cotton sheets and the heavy flannel quilt my mother made for us up to my chin, a book leaning against the pillow on my tummy, my eyes growing heavier until I drift off. I zoom through the days and look over my shoulder at the setting sun and at the hurried moments, the missed bits with the kids and the mate, and I wonder. What if?

And morning comes too soon. We do it all again.

I wanted to tell you about the trip, but the words just aren’t there right now. These other ones were in the way, and somehow the images I captured along the road illustrate it all too perfectly. I carry the pictures of the friends and family I had the good fortune to spend time with inside of me because I forgot to pick up the camera and focused instead on being with them with every available bit of myself. So bear with me over the next week or so as I figure out what the hell I’m trying to say and show you a bunch of photos of the world we zoomed through at 70 mph.

Oh, and Lila wants to know if you think she’s very pretty…

and also…are we there yet?

Busier than busy with work this week and next, so posting will be lighter than usual. I’m also trying to find my topical direction for this blog during the off season. So let me ask you: is there anything you’d like to read about here? Any question you’ve wanted to ask? Comment you’ve wanted to make?

Here are some areas I’d like to explore here during the cold/inside months:

Paring down the stuff
Embroidery
Cookbooks
Testing recipes more than once
Bread baking
Choosing color for walls

I’m fast running out of warm days to get my end-of-season garden work done and the yard looks a tremendous mess. I keep hoping we’ll have a few weeks of Indian summer this month coming up so I can put the veggie gardens to bed, build those two new beds closer to the road, build a compost pile and mulch the perennials. Oh, and rake/mulch the leaves. But it’ll be what it’s going to be.