Ready, Set, Go!

{or Let's Get it Started}

It's 2013. I've taken down the tree and put away the ornaments. I've dusted and swept up about a gajillion pine needles. I'm ready.

For the past several years I've picked a Word of the Year, an area of focus for the days ahead. This year I think I'm going with two words: Simplify & Courage.

SIMPLIFY: declutter - my house, my brain, my life. Streamline. Get efficient. Eliminate excess and focus on fewer things.

COURAGE: Be brave. Take risks. I once read where someone said "In the end no one is going to thank you for not living your life." It hit me like a sack of bricks. I kinda think I'd been feeling proud of myself for making safe and responsible choices or for putting other people first all the time. Hearing the truth, that there's no reward for martyrdom, that you don't get a prize for never taking a crazy risk, made me realize if I have something I really want I need to GO FOR IT! Now. Cause time isn't going to wait for me to get brave. I just need to put on my big girl panties and start trying.

So here I go — I'm starting today (I already simplified by getting rid of five Christmas decorations that I've never liked. Yay me.).

Are you starting something new this year? Trying things differently? Anyone else out there have a "Word" for the year or a special goal? I'd love to hear what everyone's planning.

Happy New Year all!

Auld Lang Syne : JT style

 

I'm a little in love with James Taylor.

That voice — it's like butter (I say in my best New York accent).

James Taylor's songs have been woven into the background of my life ever since I can remember. My parents had his early albums on vinyl, his newer releases we purchased on cassette, and now I own them all on CD. His musical career exactly spans the entire length of my life. His first album was released the year I was born and he continues to make music and tour today.

I remember singing along with "Sweet Baby James" on a family road trip circa 1978. I watched the scenery pass outside my window and relished a line from that song —"with 10 miles behind me and 10,000 more to go." I loved the notion that there were so many more miles ahead. So much promise. A long journey that was just beginning.

My list of "Things to do in This Lifetime" included seeing James in concert and I finally got to see him perform several years ago when he came to Missoula. I cried the entire time. I think my husband thought I'd lost my marbles (Honestly, I was a little concerned too).

My mother once said "That's one of the things I'm going to miss when I die . . . James Taylor's voice." I soooo agree. Gosh, I'm really going to miss it. 

But I'm here now and it's almost the new year so I'm listening to this song and thought you might like to hear it too.

Happy New Year friends.  Here's to all the miles we have ahead of us!

Holiday crumbs & bits

Whew! We did it. Another Christmas.

Now it's "hang time" — that nebulous, hazy space between a holiday and the start-up of everyday life. There's lots of sleeping in, lots of lounging in jammies, and lots of munching on leftover things. Outside it snows in fits and starts.

My mind is already moving into the new year. I'm all a-swarm with thoughts — plotting, planning, daydreaming, scheming . . .

Dear 2013, 
Let me share a few of my thoughts and hopes with you . . .  

Christmas wishes

Wishing you peace, joy, and a very merry Christmas.

xoxo
Jenny



this peace-promoting barn is just a few miles up the road from our house ~ love it

Pieces of Christmas

How is it that it's almost Christmas and I'm still making runs to the post office and daily emergency shopping excursions? Geez.

It's been cold, cold, cold. I keep thinking about flannel nightgowns — the kind I wore as a little girl that went all the way to my ankles and had long sleeves. I kinda want one. Has anyone ever made one? I wonder if it would be a beginner-type sewing project or if I'd end up wearing a bizarre flannel tent.

Busy as Elves

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas! Things are busy, busy, busy . . . and the snow arrived Friday night to add an extra dash of holiday spirit. I rallied everyone out of the house with a trip to Dairy Queen for ice cream and a drive around the neighborhood to look at all the Christmas lights. We opened the front door and found a full-on blizzard outside. The short drive to Dairy Queen was quite an adventure — large drifts, cars cautiously navigating unplowed streets. At one point it was blizzarding sideways. Just a solid whiteout heading from West to East. I loved it.

All of the houses in our neighborhood are gussied up with lights and wreaths and some have those crazyhuge blow-up things — 10-foot tall Santa balloons and whathaveyou. It's fun to see all the different styles and tastes in lighting and decor.

After that little adventure we hunkered down for most of the weekend, only venturing out when necessary, although the girls did gather their friends for a lot of sledding and snow play. Being one who isn't too fond of the cold, I was waiting indoors (where it was cozy), prepared with hot chocolate when they came piling back inside.

The polymer clay snowmen I made are now standing in my Christmas village. I am pretty proud of how they turned out. They stand about 1-1/2 inches tall and have real twig arms from the spirea bush out front.

Kate got bit by the creativity bug today and got busy melting chocolate and crushing candy canes (results in marshmallow photo above). She hummed Christmas songs while she worked — sweet girl.

And Izzy? Well she just follows me all around the house asking "Now what are we doing?" "Where are we going now?" "Can I eat some of that too?" "Should we take a nap together?" Oh, that FACE.

And a short pause

{or How I spent a few days gearing up for the coming of December}

skimming Poetry books and watching Larry David make a mess of things in old episodes of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'

cooking up a batch of turkey noodle soup

hanging a few wintery/holiday things

trying to be Alicia Paulson (it's hard! dang, she's good)

 











 
doing dishes while Izzy lays at my feet (there's a heat vent under the sink kickboard)

enjoying my new oil lamp (purchase inspired by my pilgrim obsession of last week)

walking by this downtown apartment window (just as it asked to be photographed)

impulsively purchasing some deliciously retro fabric — vintage Santas and folks strolling festive city sidewalks — then grabbing some polymer clay because I suddenly felt like making tiny snowmen

~

I'm easing myself into the Christmas season. If I rush in too quickly I tend to grow weary by the time the actual day rolls around, so I'm taking it slow . . . humming along with the tunes in the stores, browsing the gifts, but not buying too much yet.

I'm also decompressing from watching the entire 2nd season of 'Downton Abbey' while my mom was visiting. I was in a British WWI-era fog for several days, dreaming of wearing exquisite gowns and attending dinners with Matthew Crawley. Oh dear. Thankfully, the effect has worn off and I'm back to my old self again.

~

See those poetry books? Remember my "Poetry Workshop" class? Well, let me just say this — analyzing poetry is kinda hard and boring. It seems the more I think about HOW to write it the WORSE I get at actually writing it! Aaack!

BUT - the Ken Burns documentary on the Dust Bowl was on last week and it was really fantastic. Thus concludes my class on the Dust Bowl. I gave myself an 'A' for participation, effort and knowledge retention. :)

What are you up to these last November days?

Pilgrim Dreams

This weekend was just what the doctor ordered. I got lots of R&R and whipped that nasty cold into submission. I'm feeling nearly 100% and rearing to get busy plotting and planning for Thanksgiving. Just a little over a week to go, folks!

This year's Thanksgiving Day Players:

~ Me - the chef (although Gary gets the turkey in the pan because I really hate to touch raw meat)

~ Gary - Guitar strummer, football watcher, turkey slicer

~ Emma & Kate - Macy's Parade watchers, lounge-abouts, chat-n-munch duo

~ My mother - arriving from Texas in just two days. Assistant chef. Crazy laundress (as post-traumatic stress from having 6 kids she is constantly doing laundry. She will wash any swatch of cloth she encounters, short of yanking the clothes off your body)

~ My mother-in-law - lives in town, pie-maker

~ My sister - flying in from New Hampshire . . . and 

~ Her boyfriend

Yippee! Bring it on. 

I've always loved Thanksgiving. The parade, the day spent fussing around in the kitchen, the mashed potatoes, the pumpkin pie, the family, football announcers, laying on the floor like a lump after dinner.

Plus, I had ancestors on the Mayflower so I kinda like to think of myself as a true pilgrim . . . deep down. A soap-making, embroidering, reading-by-candlelight kind of pilgrim.

Of course anyone who knows me knows that I would have made a terrible pilgrim. I think I would've complained a lot and needed quite a few naps. The long, cold winters spent milking a cow, hand washing laundry with lye and schlepping chamber pots outside would've put me right over the edge. I would've either died of exhaustion, starvation (from refusing to eat the salted meat from the barrel) or the other villagers would've taken me on a long walk and "accidentally lost" me in the woods.
 
Lucky for me I don't need to test my pilgiming skills. I just need to make a dinner and eat an excessive amount. Now THAT, I can do.

For now I'm trying desperately to hold Christmas at bay until the last of the leftovers have been stacked in the fridge and the dishwasher is running. It seems such a shame to overlook the holiday of "giving thanks." 

That said, I have a tiny confession (you know I love to confess) I found myself listening to a little Christmas music while I worked today. I love Christmas music with all my heart — Bing, Nat, Ella, Frank, Glenn Miller . . . I can't get enough of that stuff! 

Hope your Monday's been groovy. As always, I soooo appreciate you dropping in. It means a lot to me.

Two Little Bees & A Teen

Thank you for enduring my Halloween rant on Monday. 

Now that it's all said and done I can honestly say things went festively well. Also, I have a confession: 

I want you all to know that I am now one of those people who puts their pet in a costume. I truly never thought I would be a pet-costume person, but if there's one thing I've become progressively more sure of it's that you should "never say never" because life is always a wild ride. That said, last year I thought pet costumes were silly. And this year I CROCHETED A PET COSTUME for my yorkie. Oh my. 

But she was so stinkin' cute in it. Then Kate decided to join in the fun and be a bee too. It was a regular swarm around here. Emma decided this was the year to call it quits. She still wanted a photo though, so we took one of her, dressed as herself (note the cell phone, which I think is permanently adhesed to her hand). 

How were things in your neck of the woods? Spooky? Chocolatey? Were there any costume-clad animals?

Halloween : A love/hate story

Can you feel it in the air? It’s coming. The time is drawing near. Tomorrow is that crazy, over-done, bizarre holiday. I sorta love it. But truthfully I kinda hate it. It’s Halloween.

Like a moth to the flame every year I get caught up in the whirlwind of it all -  plugging in my pumpkin-scented air freshener, humming an eerie little tune, making spooky crafts, planning costumes. But at the same time I find the actual day, the 31st, a rather chaotic nightmare of sorts. Mostly it just makes me tired.

The season starts off innocently enough. I spend two hours of my Saturday crawling and crashing around in the storage closet trying to find the Halloween decorations, then the kids and I get busy hanging lights with miniature smiling pumpkins and sticking clingy ghosts to the windows. There’s a skeleton for the front porch and ghost salt and pepper shakers for the table (with last year’s salt hardened into a brick inside). We finish with some pumpkin tea-light holders and string up some cotton “spider-webs” on the porch . . . all this, and my husband hasn’t once looked up from the football game (but hey, that’s a whole other joyous part of Fall that I won’t go into right now).

“Can we go to that cool costume store?” my daughters ask. They’re referring to this huge mega-Halloween store that comes into town just during the month of October. I think it’s a national chain, and they move in each year and transform a vacant commercial building into a living nightmare of costumes and decorative paraphenalia. It’s amazing — and amazingly overpriced.

I agree to take them, and prep for the journey with a pair of ibuprofen washed down with a Diet Coke. Once inside, we navigate our way through the aisles. Did you know you can buy extremely realists scabs, gashes and head wounds? You can even get them with maggots munching on the exposed muscle or under-the-skin worm infestations. It's so icky and they are so real looking that I can hardly stomach standing near the displays. 

There are actual walking mummies, headless men holding chainsaws, and severed hands that crawl across the floor. There are full-sized gravestones to decorate your yard (some come with a half-decayed guy crawling out of the bottom), flying bats, screaming skulls with red glowing lights in their eye sockets, and a corpse bride holding a champagne glass full of her own blood. They’re everywhere, surrounding you like the zombie people in the Thriller video. I cannot get out of there fast enough.

When did Halloween become so crazy and overblown? When I was little we just gathered stuff from around the house to create our own costumes. I would put on my robe, a bath cap and slippers, then grab a doll and Voila! I was an “exhausted mother.” Or we’d throw on Dad’s woodworking goggles and toolbelt to go as a carpenter. One year I borrowed my Aunt’s beekeeping suit and clomped through the neighborhood as a beekeeper. Ah, the simple days. Not to mention the financial advantages. But as my kids would remind me, it’s not 1975, and dressing as a hobo isn’t acceptable anymore. Aside from the fact that the days of riding the rails with a knapsack are pretty much over, dressing as a homeless, marginalized member of our society seems terribly distasteful.

So we open our door to the latest trends and watch as hundreds of children become pop culture icons and characters from Disney’s latest endeavors. We host slews of Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles at our door. Last year there was a long line of Dora the Explorers, their bobbed wigs slightly askew. There were princesses in sparkly dresses paired with dirty sneakers, a couple Obamas, a Pikachu, Lady Gaga, and several 1980s girls traveling with a gaggle of Batmen.

Usually the evening starts in mass chaos. I try to fork a few bites of broccoli casserole into the kid’s mouths and take a few photos for posterity while they argue against wearing a coat over their outfits (it’s like 10 degrees outside!), and call all their friends to map-out their route.

My husband is in his element as designated “flashlight finder.” His duties include locating a few of the ever-elusive 50 flashlights we own, then hunting down a handful of working batteries. There is a bit of swearing and fussing involved. “Why are there never any flashlights when we need them?” he yells, at me of course, since I obviously spend a lot of time cooking and cleaning by flashlight light (NOT!). 

The kids head out and I settle in for a night of opening the door to an assortment of kiddos – all those red-nosed children, peering awkwardly through the eyeholes of plastic masks, tripping over their ghostly sheets, and crashing through my chrysanthemums as they clamor off the front porch. It’s like a painting by Norman Rockwell, except for the part where the mom (that'd be me) keeps eating piece after piece of the 'Pal' gum from the candy bowl. Within an hour I’ve exhausted most of the supply and my jaw is making a weird clicking sound from all the hard chewing. If you’ve ever had one of those little gum pieces you know how addictive they can be. They’re so sugarydelicious when you first chew them, it’s like tasting heaven – though I hope the flavor in heaven lasts a longer than the flavor of Pal gum. Within two minutes you have a nasty acrid taste in your mouth and you must IMMEDIATELY spew the gum into the trash. THEN, however, you think about the gum and how tasty it was in the beginning and. . . it starts all over again.

Another part Norman would never paint is the part where the night turns shady. The part where the older kids throw on their camouflage coats and start slinking up to the door in large groups. By this point my own kids have come home, counted their loot, and brushed their teeth extra-hard (per my instruction). Then, just as I plop onto the couch to watch the news and sip my bedtime tea, the real goblins start to bang on the door. These aren’t princesses or robots. They’re . . . (gasp here) large teenagers! Some have stubble, some even look old enough to drive my carpool, and no, they’re not even dressed up. They’re wearing their usual teen garb. They’re holding pillowcases filled ¾ full, and in case you didn’t know . . . that’s a LOT of candy. They have nose piercings and pink hair and wear sweatshirts that say “Kiss my A*$.”

Normally I might be tempted to say something like “Aren’t you getting a little old to be Trick-or-Treating?” but it’s really dark, these kids are the size of giants (I’m a mere 5’2”, and that’s on a good day), and they look extremely hormonal. So I don’t say a word. I just nod cooly and throw a couple Snickers in their bags. They turn without saying a word (occasionally one will grunt) and vanish into the darkness. It’s scary – on so many levels. Oh, and heaven-forbid you run out of candy! That could mean eggs on the back of the car, pumpkins smashed on the mailbox, and probably other shenanigans that I can’t even dream up. To avoid the wrath one year I had to scavenge the house – cough drops, peppermints from the last time we ate at Pizza Hut, a couple Pepto-Bismol tablets. I barely made it, but I had something for everyone.  

The night usually ends with a migraine and jitters from all the Pal gum. I drift to sleep, penciling a post-holiday list in my mind: tear down the decorations, dig wrappers out of the bushes in the yard, eventually use a shovel to scrape the rotten jack-o-lanterns off the front steps. I ponder the issue of candy allotment and distribution that I will deal with for the months to follow. Do you let them eat it at-will, suffering through the sugar highs and lows? Do you dole it slowly, meanwhile risking that you’ll give in to your nightly cravings and end up betraying your child's trust as well as putting on ten pounds? Do you have them binge for a week and toss the rest? Ahhh, the decisions and indecisions of parenthood.

Happy Halloween!

These United States

Today Americans celebrate this wonderful country we call home. Fly your flag, throw a barbeque, run through the sprinkler, wear something red, white & blue, watch the fireworks display, remember someone who made a difference for this country, think about the Declaration of Independence (how we are called to respect all people as equals) and the Bill of Rights – the freedoms we enjoy (and should always let others enjoy - religion, speech).  When I think of these documents and the truths that lie at the core of our country I am honored to call myself an American.

Happy Independence Day!

Izzy + Me = True Love

I forgot to show you the card Izzy gave me for Mother's Day. Wasn't that sweet of her?! And inside it says "I'm so glad you found me and made me your 'baby'! Awww.

The story goes that I found Izzy on Craigslist. As a self-admitted Craigslist Junkie I turned there when I started my search for a little dog. Tule and Piper are wonderful doggy friends but they are big-time shedders and Emma is very allergic, so they spend a lot of time outdoors and only inhabit our mudroom area when they're in the house and at night. I wanted Emma to have a pet she could hug, and I wanted someone who could keep me company while I work and putz around the house during the day. I quietly started my search for a snuggy, tiny, hypoallergenic dog. I wanted it to be a rescued dog (I selfishly enjoy rescuing things). I searched humane society listings all over Montana and eastern Washington, and I checked Craigslist every day. 

There were a few contenders, but not many little dogs make it into shelters. Mostly they are filled with large breeds (a lot of Pitbulls, Cattle dogs and black Labs). I felt sad that I couldn't take them all home with me. Then one day I looked on Craigslist and there was a listing for a Yorkie, 5 mos old. Her people were moving and needed to find a home for her. I emailed right away. A guy called me and we agreed to meet in the REI parking lot. I would take her for a few hours to see what I thought. 

I emailed Gary these words "If I tell you something do you promise not to get mad?" It's a line from the movie "She's Having a Baby" (John Hughes, circa 1988) we occasionally recite to each other. He called to find out what the heck I was up to. He promised not to get mad, so I told him that I was "test driving" a puppy, which made him sigh heavily and note that no one actually returns a puppy once they take it for a test drive.

It turns out he was right. Izzy came home with the girls and I in the car that afternoon in early December 2011 and she never left. My family teases me that she is the third daughter that I always kinda wanted but we never had. I remember even thinking that if I had a third girl I might name her Izzy . . . it's a sign that we were meant to be together.

Ida Ho!

 At the park on Lake Coeur d'Alene.

Walking the boardwalk. A few minutes after I took this photo Kate and I witnessed a marriage proposal! Kate was so excited. "I just can't get it out of my mind" she kept saying, "Today we saw people get engaged!"

These Phlox were growing wild in a wooded area near the soccer complex. Kate and I pulled a sprig to plant in our yard. We also found half of a beautiful, tiny blue robin's egg. Kate has it under glass on her bookshelf.

~ Emma and her team played their hearts out and went to the semi-final game. ~ We all got a little sun burnt.

It was a good weekend to be a mother.

Me and my Peeps

Aren't they cute? I keep them by my desk year-round - that's how much I love Peeps. If it's close to Easter and you can't find me just look in my closet. Chances are I'm in there eating the heads off little marshmallow chicks and bunnies.

Happy Easter!