Improg word: Order

My improg, and blogging in general, has been pre-empted lately by work, driving people here and there, illness, work, three and a half days of sunshine (three and a half days!), work, gardening, volunteering, work, general disorganization, the dreaded grocery shopping, and work.

There are a few different approaches I could take to today’s word. If you’re one of the three people who read this blog regularly, you know I’m trying to get my life in order, but since I’ve been failing miserably at that lately (see above), I’ll pretend that this approach didn’t occur to me and move right on.

I used to be a waitress, so I took a lot of orders, screwed some up, and even dropped a few. I’m a mom, so I give a lot of orders, too. And at times I’d love to have a wooden gavel so I could bang on the kitchen table and shout “Order! Order in the house!” and threaten any disorderly family members or cats with a stint in the clinker. Finally, there's the burning question of why, being such an overly educated person and trained as a librarian to boot, I have to sing the ABCs every time I put things in alphabetical order.

But instead I did a little research on something I’ve wondered about for years. You know how they say that your birth order can have a big impact on your personality? Well, I’m not sure just how this fits my crazy upbringing.

Originally, I was the younger of two, with a brother four and half years older than me. Then my dad remarried, so from the age of 10, I was the second youngest of six (although I didn’t live with these siblings). When I was 11, my brother moved to our dad’s and then I was like an only child at my mom’s (my main home). But much of the time I had to be more of an adult than a child in that relationship.

Three years later, my mom and I moved. Every summer I travelled 1000 miles to spend two months at my dad’s, where my younger stepsister was the only child still at home. While I’m a year older than she is, we were so much younger than the others that we were always treated like a matched pair. We hated this (and, often, each other) when we were younger, but in our case the adage about absence making the heart grow fonder was true. Although I sometimes obnoxiously lorded it over her that I was the older one, really it was like having a sister who was my own age but looked nothing like me.

So I’ve been the youngest, a middle child, the oldest, and an only. According to the stereotypes, I should have every personality characteristic under the sun. I should be extraverted, introverted, responsible, lazy, high achieving, low achieving, a conformist, a rebel, dependent, independent, able to get along with everyone, and unable to relate to others. No wonder I’m so confused.

I think some experts would count my family of origin as the most important one. According to an article in Time, my brother should be the favorite child. He should also be smarter than me and more likely to pursue higher education, thanks at least in part to the fact that he had a younger sibling to mentor. Does (unsuccessfully) trying to teach someone to burp the alphabet count as mentoring?

I, as the younger one, should rebel against his success and be more of a “loose cannon,” “less educated,” and “likelier to live [an] exhilarating life.” Obviously, my family never read this article, because this is not how we turned out. When I rebelled, it certainly wasn’t against my brother (in fact, he often contributed to my delinquency). He went straight to the real world; I spent a ridiculous number of years in university. And in my life, crossing five things of my to-do list in one day is about as exhilarating as it gets.

It’s a toss up as to which of us is smarter, but I can tell you this: I am definitely the favorite. So there.

Green Friday: Buried in junk mail, part 3--Direct mail

As I said a couple of weeks ago, stopping the flow of unaddressed junk mail here in Canada is easy. It’s the addressed stuff that is harder to deal with.

Charity appeals pose a real problem for me. Although I realize that organizations rely on them for fundraising, the number I receive is ridiculous. I saved them all over a two-month period and ended up with a stack several inches high. It’s time for charities to look for innovative ways to get their fundraising message out, instead of blindly mailing out envelopes stuffed full paper.

The ones that really annoy me are organizations that I already donate to asking me for more, more, more. Our public television station is a prime example. I’m more than happy to support them and every year I donate what I feel we can afford. But no sooner have I renewed my membership than I’m getting special appeals from them, and they start bugging me to renew several months before I need to.

And then there are the junk faxes. Not only are these marketers wasting paper, they’re wasting my paper.

There are some steps you can take to reduce the flow of direct junk mail. The Direct Marketing Association in the U.S. and the Canadian Marketing Association both offer “do not contact” lists. The American organization offers several options. In Canada, registering means that you will not be added to any new contact lists (mail, fax, or phone) for a period of three years. Opinion varies on how effective these are. (The CMA is not letting me link directly to their registration page, but you can get there through the "Do Not Contact Service" button on the right side of their home page.)

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse gives more tips for those in the States to reduce all kinds of junk mail.

In addition to registering with the Canadian Marketing Association, I’m trying to systematically deal with all of those offers and appeals. First, I’m cancelling store loyalty cards that I don’t use on a regular basis. I actually started doing this when I realized that I was carrying about 54 pounds of these cards in my purse, and I decided that getting a free greeting card at Hallmark or a $5 coupon at a shoe store once a year was not worth having lopsided shoulders at the age of 60.

Whenever I get mail from the stores whose cards I’ve kept, I look for a way to contact them to ask that they not send me any special offers. I don’t use these offers. Sometimes they make it out to my car or into my wallet, but 99% of the time they languish there. I’ve accepted the fact that, for me, these coupons are a waste of paper and my limited brain space, so I don’t want them anymore. I’ve been surprised to find that most stores do have a way to opt out of receiving these offers. You may need a magnifying glass, though, because they’re written in teeny tiny print.

I’ve also started favoring those charities that don’t sell or trade their mailing lists, or at least allow me to tell them not to pass my name along. Some, like the World Wildlife Fund, let you choose how much mail you receive from them. This makes so much sense. If I know I can give only once a year, let me tell you this so you won’t waste your money and a whole bunch of paper trying to get more out of me. Some are also moving to email for their newsletters.

If you have any tips for stemming the flood of junk mail, please let me know!

Wordless Wednesday #12--Watching the world walk by

For another one of my Wordless Wednesday photos, see my other blog. For other people's see wordlesswednesday.com.

Well, that explains a lot

My crummy mood lately is probably due in part to the weather. According to the Vancouver Sun, we are going through the coldest spring since 1972 (a record-setter I don't remember because I was very wisely living in a warm and sunny place then).

My heart is longing for capris, t-shirts, and sandals, but I'm still swaddled in jeans, sweaters, and socks.

My heart is longing to open the windows and let in the sound of birds singing, but I'm still listening to the hum of the furnace.

My heart is longing to have enough natural light to take pictures inside (imagine!), but my camera is still asking for the flash outside on most days.

My heart is longing to take unencumbered walks in the sun, but I'm still juggling my camera, an umbrella, and tissues for my cold-induced runny nose, and my shutter-button finger is, more often than not, numb.

Things are improving. The boots, big coats, and snow clothes have been put away. My kids and I have pretty much recovered from Ugly Winter-Hand Syndrome. Flowers are blooming. It was light out after 8:00 last night. The gardening season officially opens this weekend, which means that, theoretically anyway, we're past the threat of frost.

And we're supposed to have at least two warm days in a row, starting on Thursday. Two whole days in a row! Not one, but two. Maybe even three, according to the extended forecast. Not tease-you-in-the-morning-with-a-bit-of-sun-but-then-cloud-over-and-start-raining-by-noon days. Whole days! I can't wait. I'm trying to figure out how I can spend every minute of those days outside.

On Wednesday night you'll find me at the back of my closet, digging out the flip-flops and t-shirts that haven't seen the light of day since last summer. That weather forecast better be right.

Green Friday: Seed starters

I’m going to take a break from junk mail this week. The sun is shining today (although it’s not close to warm yet—where is spring this year? My flip-flops would like to know) and my thoughts are turning more and more to gardening.

I’m not a knowledgeable gardener, despite the rather large library of gardening books I have, and I tend to garden more by accident and procrastination than by design. But the accidental successes I have are enough to keep me going—that and the fact that if I don’t, our forest will slowly but surely take over our yard and I’ll never see the sun again.

I’ve never been completely successful with starting plants from seed, due in part to my haphazard watering habits. But I’d like to master it because, in addition to being cheaper, it seems that it must be more environmentally friendly than buying pots of seedlings: no new plastic pots being made and thrown away, no truckloads of plants being transported. (Also, I have some craft projects in mind for empty seed packets so I have some extra motivation to plant seeds.)

This year I’ve decided to buy as few new plants as possible. Every year I divide my mature perennials in the seemingly impossible attempt to fill up this big garden of mine. In the past few weeks I’ve gone to a couple of plant sales put on by public gardens and clubs, where the plants are divided or started from cuttings and planted in reused pots (I also discovered that one of the gardens here will gladly take used plastic pots—bonus, since so many of them don’t have recycling numbers on the bottom and can’t go in the city pickup). And I’ve renewed my determination to get some little seeds to grow.

A couple of weeks ago, Child Two and I made 90-something of these seed-starting pots from toilet paper tubes.

I first saw the instructions in the February/March issue of Mother Earth News, and since then I’ve run across them on the internet too. We planted them up with a variety of flower and vegetable seeds and put them in our little greenhouse cart on the deck. It’s not an ideal place for them, but because of the Most Horrible Plant Slayer who lurks in our house, we can’t start them inside. They wouldn’t dare ever pop their first leaves out of the dirt for fear of having them chomped right off. When the planting season officially starts on the Victoria Day weekend, we can plant the pots right into the ground.

I would love to hear your tips for environmentally friendly gardening!

Wordless Wednesday #11--Hiding in the daffodils

For another one of my Wordless Wednesday photos, see my other blog. For other people's see wordlesswednesday.com.

Improg word: Orange

I don’t have a lot of time for an improg entry this week. I’ve got four big work projects on the go, plus my regular chauffeur duties; two track meets; a year-end planning meeting; dance, music, and art classes; a shift in the school library; and a “quick” visit for tea with my mom and a friend of hers tomorrow that I know will turn into an all-day thing. And some of these take place at the same time, which means I also have to get my time machine working so I can be in three places at once.

The upshot of all this is that I have about 100 hours’ worth of work sitting on my desk and only about 20 hours this week to make some headway into it. I just can’t spend an hour pondering over a word, even if it is something fun like yodel or stapler.

Fortunately, I picked a fairly visual word today: orange. I was never too fond of orange until recently. Because I grew up in the 70s, orange was inextricably linked in my mind with brown and green, together forming ghastly upholstery patterns. And it reminded me of fall, when the leaves turn color and the dreaded winter looms.

I don’t have a favorite color—being fickle like I am, with a short attention span, I have a different “favorite” every day, depending on my mood and the weather. On any given day, it might be yellow or blue or red or purple or even green. But orange never even made it into the cycle

Then I accidentally painted my office orange. I know what you're thinking ("What a twit!"), but it was easier than you might think to do something like that. The paint chip clearly showed a Tuscan gold—classy and calm. I pictured myself working in an environment that would make Martha Stewart proud—ordered, coordinated, just the kind of place to write and edit works of great wisdom. Once on the walls, though, the paint revealed its true nature—not classy or calm at all, but a riotous California-poppy orange.

Once I got over the initial shock, I realized that it was perfect for me. I am not classy or particularly calm. I come from the wrong side of the freeway in a California town and I’ve always loved California poppies and how they can grow in the most unlikely and seemingly inhospitable places. My office, which is the coldest room in our house and looks out onto the forest in our backyard (a gloomy place on a gray day), had been painted an oppressive, depressive mushroom-soup color. My new orange walls brought a shot of sunshine into the place where I spend most of my day.

Now orange is linked in my mind not with overstuffed couches or shag carpet or fall, but with spring and summer, sunshine and flowers and—very important to me—warmth. I don’t see California poppies all that much here, but now that orange has shown up on my favorite-color radar, I notice all sorts of orangeness brightening up my day.

Speaking of orange, Margerie was wondering what this was going to look like when it opened. Yesterday I was near the park where I took that picture, so I stopped by to get an update. Here it is in all its orange glory.