Always an Editor

Caution: Merge ahead

2009-02-16T13:31:00.000-08:00

Some of you know that I have two blogs: Making Do, where I post about things that I make, and this one, which is where I post about . . . um . . . everything else. The more I've thought about it, though, the more I've realized that dividing my life up like this doesn't make sense to me. So in the interests of making my life simpler--and in the hopes of posting more frequently--I've decided to merge them.

From now on I'll post only to Making Do. I've chosen that one just because I like the name better. When I have some spare time (which should be in about 2034), I'll look into actually merging the old posts into one blog. But I'll keep this blog up for now so that the links to it will still work.

So if you're looking for me, or just want to see pictures of my cats, come on over to Making Do!

One of those days

2009-02-03T20:01:00.000-08:00

Today has been one of those days. It started at 5:00 this morning when Jamie invited a strange cat in through the cat door and they woke me up with their partying. Later in the morning I broke one of my favorite bowls, part of a set that isn’t made anymore. I burned a finger and a whole batch of croutons. And much of the evening has been spent helping a teary child, overtired and overwhelmed with homework. I’ve accomplished very little of what I set out to do when I got out of bed this morning (the second time, when the alarm went off).

But if—in these days of economic crisis, conflict, and crimes against strangers that were once unimaginable—these are the traumas of my day, then I’m living a pretty blessed life.

The other night I saw something on the news that moved me to tears. Yes, yes, I know I’ve been known to cry at the dump and during sappy scenes in sitcoms, but this really was moving. During a story about Gaza, a reporter stood in front of a large pile of rubble, the remains of a building. And on top of that pile stood a group of school-aged girls playing a clapping game, just like my daughter and her friends do. I could imagine them chanting the Arabic equivalent of “Miss Mary Mack.”

Ever since I’ve had kids, whenever there is some kind of crisis in the world—a war, a natural disaster, a famine—I think of the mothers who are trying to raise their children in those conditions, and of the children whose childhoods are so drastically affected. Seeing those girls making the best of their situation, I felt both sadness and hope.

Eleven years ago

2009-01-20T11:20:00.000-08:00

Eleven years ago last week, we were stricken by the stomach flu, one by one. I was almost eight and a half months pregnant. At the end of the week, my to-do list was pretty much untouched. My hospital bag was not packed. The house was a mess. And, choosing to stay home and throw up instead, I had missed the appointment with my midwife where we were supposed to go over what to expect during labor—things I had learned two and a half years before in prenatal classes but ended up not needing due to an unexpected C-section.

Eleven years ago yesterday, Child One and I went out for our weekly trip to the muffin shop and then to the park. As I watched him run around, his cheeks bright red in the cold, I thought about how he had only two and a half weeks left as an only child. I wondered how his life would change—would it be for the better?

Eleven years ago last night, I felt strange, anxious. I wasn’t worried or upset. It was a physical anxiousness. I was sick again and figured that maybe I wasn’t really over that flu.

Eleven years ago this morning, I called the midwife to reschedule that day’s appointment because I’d been sick during the night and hadn’t slept well. We still had plenty of time to go over labor and delivery, right?

Wrong. Eleven years ago this afternoon, I went into labor. I immediately started doing laundry and tidying up the house (the logic of a mother in labor), and packed my bag.

My midwife came. Child Two was head down, but was facing sideways instead of backwards like she should be. The midwife told us that 90% of babies in this position travel 270 degrees to face the right way. Also, this was my first real labor, since Child One (who was being delivered prematurely due to a diagnosis of intrauterine growth retardation that, thankfully, turned out to be wrong) went into distress while I was still in early labor, and I was whisked to the operating room.

My midwife told us to expect a long night of back labor. She went home to grab a quick dinner, planning to come back in an hour and stay with us through the night until it was time to go to the hospital.

Wrong again. Less than half an hour after she left, and only about two hours after my first contraction, I was suddenly in the pushing stage. Now, I didn’t remember all the details I’d learned in prenatal classes, but I distinctly remembered that there were supposed to be three stages of labor. Somehow, we had skipped the long, drawn-out middle stage altogether, going right from early labor to pushing.

Eleven years ago this evening, the midwife rushed back to our house, examined me again, and gave us the news that we weren’t going to make it to the hospital. An unplanned home birth? After having had a C-section? Yikes. Her partner arrived, all dressed up—she’d left a family dinner to come, because they always did home births together. As a rule, though, they didn’t do home births after C-sections; in fact, this would be their first. But it was either that or take the risk of the baby being born en route.

Our living room was transformed into a delivery room. As I lay on the (new) couch, unable to even make it to the bedroom, my husband found the plastic sheeting the couch had come in to put under me. Every towel in the house was pressed into service (I knew I did that laundry for a reason). A portable incubator and an oxygen tank were brought in from the midwife’s car, just in case. The hospital was alerted and an ambulance was ready to come if my incisions ruptured. Through all the activity and through my less-than-stoic reactions to the pain, the cat slept on a pile of blankets in the corner.

Nothing went wrong. Eleven years ago tonight, Child Two came—on her own terms and at her own time. Eleven years ago tonight, Child One was brought home by friends to meet his sister for the first time and to give her her very first birthday present: a stuffed monkey that he had picked out himself and that today hangs above her bed. And eleven years ago tomorrow morning, I woke up in my own bed with Child Two beside me. My bag still sat at the front door.

From the beginning, Child Two has not been one to run with the crowd. She didn’t care that most babies in her position take the long way around. I can just imagine her thinking, “Hey, this other way is quicker!” And so what if everyone else goes through three stages to get out? Not her.

How fitting, then, that today, eleven years after her dramatic entrance, she chose to wear a shirt that proclaims in huge letters, “BE YOURSELF!” I hope she always will be herself, because she is a truly wonderful self.

Wordless Wednesday #28--Sunflowers

2009-01-14T08:56:00.000-08:00

Taken September 15, 2007, in West Vancouver, BC.

We've had snow on the ground for over four weeks now. My front yard still looks like it's covered in marshmallow sundae topping. The snowbank in front of the house is no longer taller than I am, but it's going to be there for days yet, if not longer. Most of the snow is in the dirty, crusty, been-around-much-too-long stage. And although buried lawns and shrubs are slowly starting to reappear, my neighbourhood is drab and gray. This picture is a reminder of what's to come.

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

Is a cell phone a musical instrument?

2009-01-08T22:19:00.000-08:00

I was planning to write a post today about my plans and non-resolutions for the new year, something reflective and maybe even a little profound. But then I got distracted, spending a good portion of the day sorting out a situation with Child One’s cell phone that was brought about by his love of music.

I’ve written before about the fact that both my kids are very musical. Sometimes their talent borders on the bizarre. For example, a couple of years ago our trusty old vacuum, which was duct-taped and repaired to within an inch of its life, became unusable. The new one is okay, but there’s one thing I hate about it: It emits a horrible noise, a high-pitched squealy kind of noise so awful to my ear that I’m tempted to buy an iPod just so I can wear it while I’m vacuuming.

A few weeks ago I heard Child One squealing along with the vacuum. He told me that he’d figured out that the vacuum made a high E, and now when it’s on, he’ll sing that note and hold it until I want to duct-tape him. Then Child Two told me that she likes to sing along to the vacuum too. What is wrong with these kids?

Child One hasn’t taken piano lessons, but he likes to pick out songs by ear on his sister’s piano. And since we bought him a cell phone in September when he started high school, he’s done the same on his phone. Remember when push-button phones first came on the market (please tell me you’re old enough to remember that) and we all learned to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by pushing the right sequence of numbers? It’s quite amazing the songs he can get out of that cell phone keypad.

Well, last night he came to us, saying that his phone wasn’t working. After spending quite a lot of time on hold listening to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” and other great tunes from my early childhood, I finally got through to a support person at the wireless company, who determined that Child One had somehow managed to enter the code that locks his phone’s SIM card. Locks it tight. Or “hard locks” it, as the term apparently goes. Meaning it couldn’t be unlocked and we had to buy a new card for $40.

Here I’d been worried that he’d accidentally call China or Australia or an equally expensive place while figuring out how to play some classic rock tune. I had no idea that he could actually break his phone.

It worked out okay, though. When I got home from getting his phone fixed, I found a message on our machine saying that the $40 parking ticket I got a few weeks ago had been cancelled. Twit that I am, I’d accidentally placed my parking stub upside down on my dashboard, and the parking company had, to my surprise, taken mercy on me when I appealed the ticket. So the money I would have spent fixing my mistake could go to fixing his.

Child One may have inherited his musical ability from his dad, but he definitely inherited his ability to be a twit from me.

Wordless Wednesday #27--Snowy beach

2009-01-07T09:07:00.000-08:00

Taken December 19, 2008, in North Vancouver, BC.

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

Starting the new year with homemade bread

2009-01-01T19:52:00.000-08:00

What could be better on a snowy New Year's Day than warm-from-the-oven bread? Not much, according to Child Two, who is in the kitchen right now cutting herself another piece.

Earlier today I came across a One-Hour French Bread recipe on the Simple, Frugal, Green Co-Op blog. I used to (before kids) make most of our bread, so yeast doesn't scare me one bit. But even if you've never made yeast bread before, try this recipe. It's truly easy.

Photo taken December 24, 2008.

The end of the year

2008-12-31T12:42:00.000-08:00

My goal for the end of the year was to be able to take some time off over my kids’ Christmas break without the constant feeling that I should be working. So November was “Enough trying to do everything at once, already!” month. My priority was work and almost everything else just had to give—hobbies, reading, taking photos, staying in touch with faraway friends. And blogs, both the reading and the writing of (my blog reader has given up trying to keep track of how behind I am, telling me only that I have a total of “1000+” unread posts in the blogs I subscribe to).

There are almost no pictures on my camera between this one

Taken October 25, 2008, in Burnaby, BC.

and this one.

Black bench, white snow. Taken December 19, 2008, in North Vancouver, BC.

Due to the hell-inducing project mentioned in my last post, “Enough trying to do everything at once, already!” month spilled over into December, merging with “Enough Christmas mayhem, already!” We’ve never been a family for consumeristic Christmases, but this year we scaled back yet again. Between work, the cold that never ends (please let it end soon; I’m tired of coughing), the usual slew of Christmas performances to attend, and being snowed in, there just hasn’t been time for as much shopping or for writing so many Christmas cards.

The result of all this is that, for the first time in years, there are no longer several large projects pitching battles for space in my schedule. I’m starting the new year with a reasonable amount of work and a much-improved ability to say no to my clients when I need to. This is one of the most important outcomes of my Year of Living Differently.

Because of the unusual amount of snow we’ve been getting, most of my time off has been spent shovelling, learning how to put chains on the car, and crossing my fingers that we’ll be able to drive to within walking distance of the house whenever we go out, but still—time off! Just like I used to be at the end of every term during my ridiculous number of years in university, I’ve felt a little lost, at loose ends, not sure what to do first.

The intensity of my work over the last couple of months has also made it hard for me to write. Sometimes spending so much energy on other people’s words makes it difficult for me to find my own. And I’ve been going through some adolescent blog-angst, wondering whether I should combine my blogs or even whether I should start blogging again at all.

As the year comes to an end, though, I’m finding my feet. I’ve taken some pictures. I’ve done some knitting. I’ve slept a lot. And now I’m planning for the new year.

Is it hot in here?

2008-10-29T09:21:00.000-07:00

I have not fallen off the face of the earth, although I'm kind of wishing I had. I am working on a project from hell. I can't say anything specific about it, of course. All I can say is that my little office has become an inferno of bad writing that needs to be made good. And like any true hellish form of punishment, it's lasting an eternity. I'm now feverishly trying to get what is supposed to be the last (please, God, let it be the last) round of substantial editing done.

I could swear I just heard Beelzebub laughing from behind the filing cabinet.

I must have done something terrible in a previous life, because I'm paying for it now.

Green Friday--Working with the weather

2008-10-17T17:29:00.000-07:00

The weather and I don’t always get along. I’ve been known to garden in the rain and to stand over a hot stove making jam on the hottest day of the year. Lately, though, I’ve been trying to think of ways that I can work with the weather to decrease the amount of resources that I use.

For example, we’ve always been ones to hang our laundry outside, if we happen to do our laundry on a sunny day. Now I keep an eye on the extended forecast and try to save the laundry for days when I can put it out for at least a few hours. Given that we live in a place with an average of 154.5 days of precipitation a year, this isn’t always possible. And sometimes, through a lack of planning or a spell of bad weather, someone runs out of clean underwear and a load just has to be done no matter what it’s doing outside. But there are some weeks in which the dryer has hardly any work at all and I would guess that we use it maybe 50% of the time we would if we were using it to dry all our laundry.

My office is cold—so cold that my fingers sometimes go numb and it’s hard to type. It doesn’t help that the only thermostat for the whole house is upstairs, where it’s brighter and warmer, and my office is downstairs, where it’s darker and colder. In the past, when it got cold enough that a couple more layers of clothes couldn’t keep me from shivering, I either turned up the heat for the whole house (which I hate to do, since it’s a big waste) or kept a space heater near me all day (which I don’t like much either, since it’s noisy). Now I take my laptop upstairs on cold days. Two added benefits are that (a) on particularly gloomy days, of which we have many, it’s much nicer to be upstairs and (b) I get extra exercise—and generate heat—by running downstairs several times a day for reference books, files, or the chocolate bar I’ve hidden in my desk.

If I’m planning to do some baking, I try to do it on a cold day rather than a warm one. Our oven is a 1970s classic and not very efficient, so it makes sense to have it leaking heat on a cold day instead of when the house is already warm enough. It heats up our tiny kitchen so well that I can do my work at the table and turn the heat down a little bit in the rest of the house.

Child Two and I walk to school whenever we can, but when it’s really raining, we drive. Now that the fall weather is truly here, that’s happening more often. If I have errands to do in that direction, I save them for the days we drive so that I can drop her off at school on the way and not use any extra gas. Errands that are closer to home I save for nicer days and I walk instead of taking the car.

I can’t control the weather. I have to stand at the sidelines at soccer games and cross country meets no matter how hard it’s raining (why can’t my kids pick indoor sports?). But in trying to work with the weather, I’m finding that, in addition to saving some energy, I’m a little more appreciative of the variety we have here. I’m grateful as I hang out the laundry on a sunny day and I enjoy the coziness of a warm kitchen on a rainy one.

Enough, already!--Month eight

2008-10-01T11:32:00.000-07:00

Well, here I am being completely wordy on Wordless Wednesday yet again. It’s the eighth month of my “Enough, already!” project and this month—strange as it may sound—I’ve decided say “Enough reality, already!”

I don’t know if I can explain this clearly, although it makes sense in my own head. It’s based on two concepts I’ve come across in several different places. The first is acting “as if”—the idea is that if you don’t know how to do something, or don’t want to do it, you act as if you can or you want to until you learn how or start enjoying it or get it finished. The second is the idea that your experience of what is going on around you is heavily affected by the filters you see it through, and those filters are based on your past experiences, your relationships with others, and so on. I’ve heard this idea before but lately I’ve been coming across it over and over: online, in magazine articles, in books. I’m taking it as a message from the universe (self-centered, aren’t I, thinking that the universe is sending me messages again?).

I’ve been trying this out to see how I can use it. Take, for example, walking. Not the actual physical act of walking—even though I’m a total klutz and have been known to trip on air, I’m pretty successful at walking most of the time. For the past few years I’ve been wanting to exercise more by going for regular walks. But I don’t have the time. Really, truly, if I compare all the things I have to do with the amount of time in the day, I do not have time to go for walks—I barely have time to go to the bathroom. But since school started, I’ve been acting as if I do have the time and going right ahead and doing it.

I’ve also been spending more time cooking and crafting and gardening. In reality, I don’t have time for them. But I’m doing them anyway and somehow my schedule is shifting to fit them in.

These concepts work in other ways too. In reality, I’m a person who usually heads straight to the cookie jar for a snack. But now I’m acting as if I’m the kind of person who eats some fruit first. In reality, my sewing room is a cluttered mess, a fact that is often enough to stop me from working on a project. But now I’m acting as if I can find what I need—looking until I do and slowly but surely getting things in order as I look.

I’m refusing to accept the reality that I live with psychotic, plant-killing cats. I potted up some cuttings from our never-say-die spider plant and planted seeds for a kitchen herb garden and I will find a way to have plants in my house again (I am staying in touch with reality enough to plant only things that won’t harm the monsters).

I’m also refusing to accept the reality that over the years I’ve become very disorganized. Because I’m acting as if I were the old organized me, I now find myself filing papers instead of piling them on my desk and writing things down instead of trying (and failing) to remember them.

I’m finding that these concepts work well in dealing with people too. If, for example, when I ask my son to take out the garbage, I speak as if I expect him to remember and follow through, he’s more likely to do just that than if I’m thinking “I know he’s going to forget, just like he usually does.” If, when I’m talking to someone I’ve had bad communication patterns with in the past, instead of interpreting this person’s words and actions through the filter I normally use (and reacting accordingly, whether it’s warranted or not) I act as if we are perfectly capable of having a constructive conversation, we are less likely to fall into our old pattern.

So this month I’m going to ignore reality and live in my own happy little world—one in which people are mostly reasonable and cooperative, I’m organized and eat more fruit than cookies, I have time to do the things I love, and, I hope, a few plants escape death by feline.

Guess who came to dinner?

2008-09-22T21:09:00.001-07:00

Carmi’s Thematic Photographic theme of the week is nature and, boy oh boy, did we have some nature in our backyard tonight.

(I’m sitting here laughing at my own joke, which is funny to no one else but me because you all haven’t seen my backyard. My backyard is full of nature. We’ve got a forest back there, with trees that tower over our house and make me nervous when the wind comes up. We’ve got a little creek. We’ve got a tree stump big enough to seat four for a formal dinner. We’ve got bushes and flowers and berries and grass and squirrels and birds and neighborhood cats and wandering dogs and lots and lots of weeds. Considering we live in a metropolitan area, our backyard is a virtual Nature City, which is itself an oxymoron. Okay, I’ll stop now.)

Anyway, tonight we had some extra nature. Child Two and I had just come in the side door (which, as its name would imply, is between the front yard and the back) after her piano lesson when my husband said, “Make sure the door is shut. There’s a bear in the backyard.”

Child Two ran downstairs to the window. I ran upstairs for the camera. Then I heard some kids riding their bikes in front of our house, so I ran out to tell them to go inside until the bear was gone. Then I ran downstairs just as the bear went behind the playhouse and into the forest.

I missed it! And for nothing—those darn kids didn’t go inside anyway. We get evidence of bears in our yard, if you know what I mean (it’s no fun cleaning that up, let me tell you), but this was our first bear sighting in over a year and I didn’t see anything.

A while later, when I went onto the deck to bring the laundry in, I saw that the bear was back. I ran inside for the camera—which, for some ridiculous and unprecedented reason, I had actually put away (when do I ever do that?)—and ran downstairs. This time, I saw him (or her—I’m not sure, as there were no babies around and it’s hard to see the defining bits under all that fur).

Most of the pictures are blurry since I was panting from all that running, and I was shooting through a window in less-than-great light. And most of the picture are of his/her bum as he/she ate the few blackberries on our bushes. And there was a big splotch of something on his/her flank, which, in our benevolence, we’re assuming is mud. But still, here are the best ones.

It's time to fatten up for winter. At this time of year, black bears spend up to 20 hours a day eating, consuming up to 20,000 calories every day. It's slim pickings this year; the berry crops are very small due to a wet spring and summer.

Here you can see part of the forest. By the way, that weed in the foreground is not 20 feet tall. There's a big slope between the house and the bottom part of the yard.

Our visitor followed up his berry dinner with a mouthful of grass for dessert.

We can't help getting excited to see such amazing creatures in our own backyard, even though we know it would be better for them if they didn't live in such close proximity to humans. It's been a very hard summer for the bears; a lack of food has led some to be much bolder than normal and several have been shot. People's ignorance doesn't help them any, either. We hope this one can safely make it through to hibernation.

Don't just sit there!

2008-09-19T11:18:00.000-07:00

Deep vein thrombosis. Pulmonary embolism. Not sexy or funny subjects, but the topic of many news stories this week after the surgeon general put out a call to action to prevent these life-threatening conditions.

You might think this is a problem only for the jet-setting crowd (does anyone actually say jet-setting anymore?). But let me tell you, it’s not. Anyone who stays put for a long time—in an airplane, in a business meeting, sitting in front of a computer—even during the three-hour long The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers—is at risk for developing a blood clot.

I’m going to tell you the story of my blood clot. If you don’t want to read all the way through my verbosity, just take this message to heart: Deep vein thrombosis affects up to 600,000 people in the U.S. every year. One in every 100 of them dies. For untreated DVT, the rate is much higher.

Don’t sit still, people!

Several years ago, as I sat in a crowded classroom for a full-day class, my left leg fell asleep so badly that I wondered what I would do if it didn’t wake up before the class ended. Crawl to my car? Ask a classmate to carry me? Sit there until my husband came to find me?

Two weeks later, I woke up in the early hours of a Saturday with a cramp in that leg. Or at least I thought it was cramp. But it didn’t go away, not that night or the next day or the next.

Since I was on the Pill and had read the little brochure that warns about blood clots, I called my doctor’s office first thing Monday morning. The earliest appointment the receptionist would give me was on Wednesday.

Thinking that it was just a muscle thing and no cause for panic, I tried to get rid of the pain while I waited for the appointment. I stretched. I walked and walked. I massaged my calf.

I drove to and from my all-Saturday class 100 miles away, working the clutch through heavy San Francisco traffic. It’s amazing that I didn’t suffer an embolism right there in the middle of 19th Avenue.

I almost had to beg to get the ultrasound. Due to the illogical rules of our insurance company, the doctor couldn’t order the test to find out if I had a blood clot unless she was almost certain that I had a blood clot. And she wasn’t. I was too young. I didn’t smoke. There was no family history. I hadn’t taken a long flight or suffered a blow to the leg.

I tried logic: This was a life-threatening condition, not the common cold. Eventually she agreed and I got the test that afternoon.

For me, a mom of a kindergartner and a toddler, the ultrasound was like a spa treatment. Lying in a quiet, darkened room as a very handsome technician put goop on my legs, I almost fell asleep. He told me that my doctor would get the results that evening.

The next morning, I called the office and left a message. I called again and again. Finally, at 6:30 pm, after another day of running around and potentially dying, I got a call. The doctor told me to lie down with my leg at a 35-degree angle, right now. Get someone to pick up a prescription for a blood thinner, right now. Go to a special clinic first thing in the morning to learn how to inject myself with a second blood thinner. And for goodness’ sake, move as little as possible.

I’d had that clot for two and a half weeks before I learned that there was indeed a reason to panic. I can only be thankful that it hurt like hell, because for some people the first sign of a clot is collapse.

And so started six months of a scary anticlotting medication. My body needed such a large dose that the nurse practitioner in my doctor’s office said “Holy shit!” when she asked me about it (aren’t they taught that saying “Holy shit” is not a confidence-instilling response?).

I had to watch my diet and other medications carefully to avoid dangerous interactions. I wore a very fashionable Medic-Alert bracelet, so that people would know that I could easily bleed to death, and lovely compression stockings to keep the blood in my legs from pooling. I gave myself shots in the abdomen (and was very grateful for that roll of baby fat still hanging around). I met a lot of great lab technicians as I went for the blood tests that made sure the medication was balanced (daily for the first few months, then every other day, then twice a week, and finally once a week for last few weeks).

I was told to avoid activities that could involve falls, bumps, or other trauma: no horseback riding, bike riding, motorcycle riding, waterskiing. Not so hard. But also no cutting myself, no bumping into things, no falling down (if you know me, you know what a complete klutz I am). I was told to use an electric razor because a regular one was too dangerous. A few weeks in, I got hit hard in the head with a soccer ball and spent a day wondering if my brain was bleeding.

For the first two weeks, until the medication was balanced and the clot was stabilized, I was supposed to remain as motionless as possible, while somehow also driving myself to the hospital, taking care of my kids, working, going to school, and watching for signs of an embolism (chest pain, difficulty breathing, dizziness, falling down dead). I was told that “any movement of your foot or leg can send that clot flying through your veins and into your lungs or brain” (more stellar bedside manner from my medical team). I carefully considered every trip to the bathroom and to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Just how desperate was I for that cup of tea?

I also got to be a pushy self-advocate with a doctor who, going through some issues of her own that eventually led her to take a personal leave, made life-threatening mistakes with my medication, and with a receptionist team who didn’t appreciate my daily calls to the office for blood test results. I had learned hard lessons about advocacy during my first pregnancy and I was more than willing to be “that woman” who called until she got an answer.

Now, over seven years later, I still have post-thrombotic syndrome caused by permanent damage to the vein where the clot was. If I sit on the floor too long, I can feel the blood pool in that vein. My leg often aches; high-impact exercise and yoga cause it to hurt for days (on the bright side, I have a great excuse for not jogging!). I'll never be allowed to take estrogen again, in case it was a factor. I’m at higher risk for developing another clot and any time the pain is particularly bad or long lasting, I start to worry. I can’t sit still for long periods of time, which, because I work at home, means I make frequent trips to the kitchen “to stretch my legs” (= to get a cookie). I constantly nag my kids not to let their extremities go to sleep.

Before I went through this experience, I had no idea of the dangers of sitting still or crossing my legs. If I hadn't been on the Pill at the time, I would probably have ignored the pain, maybe with dire consequences. The moral of this very long story is this: Be aware of the causes and symptoms of deep vein thrombosis, and get up and move around!

Improg word: Euphoria

2008-09-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

Last week’s improg word was euphoria. I waited all week for some euphoria-inducing event to happen so I could write about it. How about getting up at 6:30 on Sunday morning for Child Two’s soccer game? Or maybe getting the dreaded grocery shopping done? Pulling out a huge pile of the morning glory that is not-so-slowly taking over my garden and heading across the lawn toward the blackberries?

Is my life glamorous or what?

As I usually do, being the glam language geek that I am, I looked up the improg word. Here’s what Merriam-Webster has to say:

euphoria (n.): a feeling of well-being or elation, especially one that is groundless, disproportionate to its cause, or inappropriate to one's life situation.

And, as I usually do, I learned something new. I had thought that euphoria was extreme happiness—the kind of thing you experience when you realize that those are your lottery tickets numbers on the TV screen—or the feeling you get from altered-state inducing substances, which I don’t do (anymore). But if you want to be technical about it, jumping up and down when you win the lottery is not true euphoria because it’s completely appropriate.

Now, if you want to talk about happiness disproportionate to its cause—well, that I do experience on a regular basis. I know I’ll feel it tonight, at my first belly dancing class since May. Just being in that room with the noise of the music and everyone’s hip scarves, struggling to do glute squeezes or getting dizzy doing spins or constantly picking up the cane (I don’t dare dance with a sword) that will not stay on my head—I blame it one the silkiness of my hair, of course—is enough to give me a feeling of well-being or elation that some would think is disproportionate to its cause.

I felt it one day last week when, as my mom and I walked to my car after an appointment, we passed a florist’s shop and saw plants covered in baby cucumbers. We each bought one. I felt a disproportionate happiness from the sight of my mom, who is easily embarrassed and much too concerned with what others think of her, walking down the busiest street in town carrying a plant that she could hardly see around (I firmly believe that doing things like this is good for her psyche). And when I brought my own plant home, I euphorically kept going out on my deck to look at it. I am smitten with those baby cukes.

I felt it again yesterday when I checked the Improgging site and saw that last week’s word was still up. Since the Improgging Fool is like that cool teacher who lets you hand in your assignments late, this means that I can keep my perfect improgging score.

Green Friday--One step at a time

2008-09-12T14:11:00.000-07:00

Now that the school year has started, the dreary, rainy, late-summer days have given way to sunny, dry, glorious ones. Of course. That’s life here in Vancouver.

Child Two and I have decided that this year we are going to walk to and from school as much as we can, driving only when we have a very compelling reason to do so, such as needing the car for a bunch of errands or an after-school appointment, having to carry something heavy or fragile, or very bad weather. If the weather is downright awful, however, we’ll be walking because we won’t be able to get the car off our road.

I used to walk everywhere I could. I would bundle my kids in the stroller to go to the grocery store, the library, the fabric store (doesn’t everyone make regular walking trips to the fabric store?), the video place—if it was at all feasible to walk, we would. Then we lived in California for five years, in a neighborhood where the only store within walking distance was 7-11. We couldn’t even walk to school.

Back in B.C., my kids were placed in a school not far from our house, directly uphill (and when I say “uphill,” I really mean “upmountain”). Getting there just about required grappling hooks and climbing ropes or whatever it is that mountain climbers use. I would often scale that slope to pick the kids up in the afternoon, holding tightly onto Child Two’s hand on the way back so she didn’t trip and roll all the way down. Climbing up in the morning was just too much for their short legs.

When that school closed, we moved to one in the next neighborhood over. It’s a longer walk and requires us to go both uphill and downhill each way, with two rather nasty hills on the way there. As with the other school, I often walked there (the hard direction) to pick them up, and on many mornings we parked just over the second bad hill and walked the rest of the way. But this year we agreed to try walking all the way as much as we could.

We decided to do this because of the obvious benefits. By my very rough calculations (made even rougher by the need to convert from imperial to metric—I came to metric late in my childhood and haven’t yet mastered it), if we walk an average of 50% of the time, we’ll save about $100 worth of gas this school year, not to mention reducing the amount of wear and tear on the car and the emissions it’s pumping out.

We’ve added a huge amount of exercise to our week—when we walk in both the morning and afternoon, I’m totalling 80 minutes a day, much of it uphill. We’ve both noticed that those nasty hills are getting easier—we hardly even slow down now.

We’re discovering some unexpected benefits, too. Our morning trip is not the frenzied rush it used to be. No longer am I trying to cram one more thing in before we go. We have to leave on time or we face dire consequences—hurrying up the hills, oh no!

Instead of driving past our neighbors, we’re walking past and saying hello. And, even more importantly to Child Two, we’re getting to know the cats and dogs along our route.

As we huff and puff, we talk about all sorts of things, from the environment to how overscheduled kids are today to what cats think about. When Child Two brings a friend home, the walk is full of laughter. She and her friends have started a new tradition: they find a good rock, kick it between them all the way home, and then put it in a special place in the garden.

On the way home in the morning, I think about what I’m going to be doing that day and find it much easier to focus when I start work. This is one of the things I miss most from my days of walking wherever I could: the transition between one place and another—a time to organize my thoughts, look at my neighbors’ gardens, and just enjoy the quiet.

We’re taking our effort to live in more sustainable way one step at a time. And a lot of what we do out of concern for the earth’s well-being has a big impact on our own as well.

Enough already--Month seven

2008-09-11T21:12:00.000-07:00

The great house decluttering that we started in the summer is progressing—slowly, yes, but progressing nonetheless. This month I’ve decided to declutter by theme instead of by room. We’ve got a lot of paper in this house—books, magazines, patterns, work files, old term papers, kindergarten drawings, scraps with scrawled phone numbers, instruction manuals for things we no longer own. There’s enough paper here to start a serious bonfire (not that I would, since backyard burning is not allowed in our town). My computer, too, is stuffed full of paper of the virtual kind— thousands of old emails, unsorted photos, and outdated files. So this month's “Enough, already!” rallying cry is “Enough information, already!” as I try to keep my head above the piles while I sort, shred, file, give away, and recycle.

Of course, I can’t really say “Enough!” to information. My whole professional life has centered around information and I’m an addict. But what’s the use of collecting knowledge, ideas, and inspiration if it’s all so disorganized that you can’t find those darn instructions for propagating fuchsias or your third cousin’s address or that book (or, in my case, books) on funny word origins when you need them?

Shredding old tax returns is not really my idea of fun. But it’s not all drudgery. Since I can’t give up multitasking entirely, I’m combining this idea with my attempt to make more time for ponytail-requiring activities by going through the humungous file of recipe clippings I’ve been collecting for years and years. I have so many that the file is almost wider than this cat:

Like the general decluttering, this job won't get done in a month. But I'm expecting that by October 1st my recycle bin will be bulging and I'll be well on my way to making better use of the information I decide to keep.

Wordless Wednesday #26--Faded hearts

2008-09-10T10:13:00.001-07:00

Taken February 17, 2008, in Vancouver, BC.

This photo is also being posted for Carmi's Thematic Photographic

theme of the week, faded.

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

Catching up

2008-09-03T21:59:00.000-07:00

I participate in three memes most weeks: improgging, Wordless Wednesday, and Thematic Photographic. Recently though, my meme fulfillment has been spotty. First, we took two trips out of town in just over a week—we were out, we were in very briefly, we were out again.

This was followed by a week of gearing up for the start of the school year and extracurricular activities, which involved much shopping: soccer gear, dance clothes, a flute, school supplies, shoes (how the heck did my son get big enough to require adult size shoes, and why do men’s soccer cleats cost twice as much as boys’? Is there twice as much material in a shoe one size bigger? I don’t think so). . . . The list was as long as my Christmas shopping list, and my credit card bill will be, too. We also squeezed in some outings which we’d meant to do all summer but hadn’t gotten around to.

Now it’s the first week of school, which means hours spent filling out forms (which are, for the most part, exactly the same as the forms I filled out last year, and the year before, and the year before that) and writing cheques. Really, for the form-filling-out, cheque-writing parent, the first week of school is just one big case of writer’s cramp.

I’ve also had to accompany Child One to his high-school orientation (how the heck did he get old enough to be in high school?). Yes, a parent was supposed to go—I didn’t just tag along. I did, however, find myself having a small anxiety attack about what I should wear, until I realized that I was not the one going to school with a bunch of adolescent fashion mavens.

And—oh, joy—soccer season has started. As manager of Child Two’s team, I am busy this week picking up equipment, updating the first aid kit, assigning snack days, emailing parents, printing up more of those forms we all dread filling out, and demanding that parents grip a pen in their now-clawlike hands one more time to write a deposit cheque before I hand them a uniform.

Even in a normal week I have a limited amount of time for blogging—that is, if I want to get my work done without my clients hanging over my virtual shoulder, wondering why the heck I’m writing about random words instead of polishing their prose. And because of that, I sometimes feel hemmed in by these memes. I have something I want to say—but, darn it, it’s Wordless Wednesday so I have to keep my mouth shut. I took a great picture—but darn it, today is the only chance I’ll have all week to post something related to the theme and this picture just doesn’t work. I have a great topic for a blog post—but darn it, how will I ever fit the word kumquat into it?

Now, I know that most people—normal people, those without the horrible drive for that 100% mark that often made me crazy during my ridiculous number of years in university—would say, “I don’t feel like doing that meme this week, so I won’t.” But even if I try to fool myself with such carefree bravado, inside it’s bothering me that I haven’t blogged about the word saving or posted a photo that fits the “poignant” theme.

Then, just like when I was in high school, I get the urge to rebel. This morning I declared, “I will go memeless this week!” (not related at all to going topless, thank goodness). And at first I revelled in the thought of all the non-meme-related things I could write about. I don’t have to write about the word coupon! Or post a water-themed photo! But as the day wore on, I knew that my mind wouldn’t rest until I at least got caught up on those improgging words.

So now I have managed to work the three improgging words I missed into one blog post, restoring my 100% participation rate—that is, unless the Improgging Fool takes marks off for late assignments.

Green Friday--A Safer Beauty Routine

2008-08-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

Most of us use dozens of chemicals on our skin, teeth, and hair every day, without any real knowledge of what they are or how they can affect us or the environment. It’s hard to decipher ingredients lists, if they’re even given, and to figure out which products are safer than others.

It seems that every year we’re told that things we thought were safe actually aren’t. The cosmetics industry is not regulated as strictly as the food industry—neither for its ingredients nor for the accuracy of its claims—and some companies use known carcinogens and other toxic chemicals in their products. Many other ingredients, while not proven to cause health problems, have been associated with them in scientific studies. And for a lot of what we pour, rub, or brush onto ourselves, and then wash down the drain, we just don’t know if they are safe for long-term use.

The Skin Deep Cosmetic Safety Database, maintained by the Environmental Working Group, can help you evaluate products you use every day: soaps, make-up, shampoos, toothpaste, nail polish, hair color, baby products, and so on. They rate products according to known or suspected hazards, based on databases of government and academic research studies on their ingredients.

You can look up your favorite products and see how they compare to others. You can search for specific brands, fragrance-free products, those with or without certain ingredients, those associated with or not associated with specific health concerns, and those likely or unlikely to contain allergens. You can also find out which companies are testing their products on animals and which have signed the Compact for Safe Cosmetics.

One of the important messages of this website is that we—meaning not just consumers, but scientists and regulators—know very little about the safety of these products. Most ingredients have not been fully tested and we can’t say with any certainty whether or not they are truly safe. But with a little knowledge we can at least limit our exposure to the most worrisome ones.

Wordless Wednesday #25--Why I've been so quiet lately (Trip 2)

2008-08-27T12:42:00.001-07:00

Taken August 21, 2008, in San Francisco.

This photo is also being posted for Carmi's Thematic Photographic theme of the week, colorful.

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

Green Friday on Thursday--Better book buying

2008-08-14T13:25:00.000-07:00

Last week, Green Friday got buried under a mountain of work as I tried meet a deadline. Not only did I get the job done on time, I got it done early. Did you feel the earth momentarily stop spinning on its axis in shock when I sent the files to my client four days before the deadline?

I won’t be able to post tomorrow, so I’m doing Green Friday on Thursday this week.

We’re a family of readers and our house is already full of books. We’re also heavy-duty library users. So any book I actually plunk down my money for—especially new—has to meet certain criteria. It has to be something that will get read more than once, or that we can share with someone else, or that requires writing or drawing in, or that I need for my work, or that we’ll refer back to over and over.

For me, it comes down to this: I don’t want to spend my money or the world’s trees on something I will read once and then stick on a shelf for 20 years (although I think the insulating value of the books we have could save us quite a bit in heating costs if we stacked them all up along the outside walls). If I can borrow a book instead of buying it, I will. If it turns out that I absolutely love it or need to have it on hand, then I’ll buy it, preferably second hand.

When I am going to buy a particular book, I always check first with Better World Books, an online seller that sells both new and used books. One of their goals is to demonstrate that a business can make a profit while having a positive environmental and social impact.

They collect unwanted books from thousands of universities and libraries, many of which would have otherwise ended up in landfills or spent years in storage facilities. They buy carbon offsets to make their shipping carbon neutral. The shelving in their warehouse is reclaimed library shelving.

And they’re devoted to literacy, which, in terms of social causes, is my “thing.” Every sale generates a donation to a literacy organization. On their website they say “So far [since 2002], the company has converted more than 11 million donated books into $4.5 million in funding for literacy and education. In the process, we’ve also diverted more than 6,000 tons of books from landfills. . . . [And] we’ve donated nearly one million books to partner programs around the world.”

Not only that, but their prices on new books are often as low as or lower than other online sellers (at least the ones here in Canada), and they have reasonable shipping costs (free in the States—can you get more reasonable than that?—and $2.97 per book anywhere else). Every time I’ve ordered from them, I’ve been happy with their service.

Please note that I have received no money, free books, credits, or other perks for writing this review (darn!).

I’m always on the lookout for businesses like this. If you know of any, tell me about them!

Wordless Wednesday #24--Pattern in the sand

2008-08-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

Taken February 29, 2008, in North Vancouver, BC.

This photo is also being posted for Carmi's Thematic Photographic theme of the week, patterns.

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

Enough, already!--Month six and Improg word: Sassy

2008-08-07T16:26:00.000-07:00

Isn’t it funny how sometimes certain words or themes will keep popping up, almost as if the universe were whacking you over the head, trying to tell you something very important?

Last month I did a calendar journal in which I cut out a word or two for each day. As the month drew to a close and I looked over my calendar, I realized that my month had been kind of boring. It’s not that it was a bad month or a hard month. It was just a rather serious month, and on many days I was hard pressed to think of anything that defined that day other than work.

One of my favorite days was a Saturday late in the month when, without any forethought, I bought a small mountain of blueberries and made jam for the first time in at least a decade. So by the time the month and my calendar were done, I had already decided that in August I would declare “Enough already!” to seriousness and make at least a little bit of time every day for some kind of simple pleasure. Nothing huge, both because I don’t have time on most days for huge and because I do believe that it’s the small things that make for a happy life.

Then, on Sunday, the second day of “Enough seriousness, already!” month, two of the funnest people in the world came to stay with my mom: an old family friend, who is in her 60s, and her 40-year-old daughter. My mom and I hadn’t seen this friend for over 30 years, nor had we been in close contact with her, and we’d never met her daughter, so we didn’t really know what to expect from this visit. As Child One said, “I expected two ladies to come and sit around Oma’s kitchen table for days. I didn’t expect to have so much fun.”

One of the daughter’s favorite words is sassy, so on Monday, I laughed out loud when I saw that this was the newly posted improg word. Oh, Universe, you’re not subtle with your ways of getting your point across, but you are funny.

Over the last five days, we’ve done all sorts of sassy things, from dancing at a free bluegrass concert to stuffing five people—including my 75-year-old mother—into a photo booth in the mall for a raucous picture-taking episode. I’ve laughed more than I usually laugh in six months—the kind of laughing where your legs go wobbly and you think you just might pee your pants. And despite several late nights due to long conversations and despite more than one trip to Dairy Queen, I’ve felt more rested, relaxed, and healthy than I have since I don’t know when.

I was sad to say goodbye to these friends, who are now on their way home. But I’m determined to keep some of their sassiness in my days from now on. Thanks, Universe, for whacking me over the head and reminding me of when I used to do fun things just for the sheer joy of it. Enough seriousness, already. It’s time for some sassiness.

Thematic Photographic--Signs

2008-08-04T07:34:00.000-07:00

Taken June 13, 2008, in West Vancouver, BC.

Carmi's thematic photographic theme this week is signs. Like Hayley, I collect pictures of signs; I've posted some of them on my blogs (here, here, here, and here). I've posted another thematic photographic entry on Making Do today.

Although I live in a big city, I often see warning signs about wildlife--bears, coyotes, even cougars. But this one was new to me.

Green Friday--Composting

2008-08-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

We’ve composted for years, but it was only recently that I learned (from my kids, who learned it at the environment club at their school) that composting has a major benefit besides reducing the mass of garbage going to landfills and producing wonderful stuff for your garden. As produce and yard waste decomposes in landfills, it gives off methane, a major greenhouse gas. But because composting involves a different decomposition process, no methane is produced.

Some people don’t want to compost because they think it’s stinky, but a smelly compost pile just means that the balance of materials is off. We keep an old garbage can full of dry leaves, dead flowers, old potting soil, and other “brown” materials next to our compost bin and every time we empty the kitchen compost pail, we add approximately the same amount of brown stuff on top. No smell at all.

If you can’t or don’t want to have a composter in your yard, consider vermiculture, or worm composting. We did this when we were living in a rental house. It was easy, fun for the kids (and educational), and helped us keep at least some of our garbage out of the landfill.

I used to be kind of squeamish about worms—due in large part to some boys who lived on our street when I was kid, who liked to chop them up—until I started gardening and realized just how important they are. But worm composting is not at all gross and you won’t end up with worms all over the place (unlike the time I dropped a full container of live crickets in my kitchen when we were frog-sitting for friends).

There are many resources available to learn about composting, and your community, like mine, might offer workshops. Some towns even subsidize the cost of backyard composters or offer them free to residents. Environment Canada and the Composting Council of Canada both have information to help you get started.

Improg word: Facetious

2008-07-31T20:05:00.000-07:00

Every Monday, the Improg site posts the word of the week for your blogging pleasure.

I’ve been putting off writing this improg post because I don’t have much to say about facetious, other than it is one of the handful of English words that contains all five vowels in alphabetical order (I like alphabetical order, which helps to explain all the dictionaries in my house). It hasn’t been a very facetiousness-inspiring week around here.

Child One has to have minor surgery in August; we found out today when it is, and his stitch-removal day is in the only week we had clear all summer to potentially take a trip further away than a weekend destination.

Both Child One and Child Two were diagnosed on Monday as needing glasses for distance. We knew this would happen sooner or later with One, but Two, unbeknownst to us, has gone from being farsighted to now being more nearsighted than her brother—a big change which we hope is not a sign of things to come (the doctor said, without a trace of facetiousness in his voice, “Oh, my, I hope she hasn’t inherited her father’s eyes”; my husband pretty much can’t see past the end of his own nose without his glasses). This diagnosis resulted in shock, dismay, some tears, and—once she’d accepted the situation—much trying on of frames. Both kids are now fitted out with glasses, cleaning cloths, and cases, and are marvelling at how much better they can see the TV.

My mother has once again created a situation that will involve a great deal of my time, energy, and gas budget; it includes one, maybe two, completely unnecessary two-hour round trips to the airport, one of which is to meet a plane whose time of arrival and city of origin we are not entirely sure of. And I am not being facetious about any of that.

I am having extremely unfacetious trouble with a client. I can’t say much, seeing as how I’m so professional and don’t talk about my clients (much). Suffice it to say that his never-ending project has become even more fraught with author-induced problems than it was before and I am seriously considering running away from self-employment into the arms of a library or bookstore job. Or even going back to waitressing at the family restaurant I used to work at, despite the fact that I swore in true Scarlett O’Hara style over 20 years ago that I would never go back even if I had starving children to feed. This project is that bad. You people who say you’d love to be an editor or proofreader because you enjoy reading have no idea. Now, if you enjoy banging your head against brick walls, I’ve got a client for you.

And I am sick with a summer cold, which includes—at no extra charge—the kind of cough that makes you wonder if your internal organs are going to end up in your lap and prevents you from sleeping more than an hour at a time, even though you’re propped up on 14 pillows to try to prevent the coughing fits that are strong enough to propel the cat who unwisely chose you as a bed right across the room. The last time I was this sick with a cold I turned out to have pneumonia. I’m hoping for the best and trying to focus on the bright side: my abs are getting a good workout, which will come in handy when belly dancing class resumes in the fall.

It hasn’t been a terrible week. Nothing earth-shattering or horrific has happened (knock on wood). It’s just been a very serious week, without much time or energy for facetious behavior.

Wordless Wednesday #23-Waterlily

2008-07-30T14:36:00.001-07:00

Taken July 19, 2008, in Kelowna, BC.

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

Green Friday--Out with the clutter!

2008-07-25T13:56:00.000-07:00

I didn’t write a Green Friday post last week because I was in this beautiful place without a computer.

Taken July 18, 2008, in Kelowna, BC.

July is “Enough stuff, already!” month here, and we’ve slowly been decluttering our house. We’re finding things we’d forgotten about or misplaced. We’re making a point of using what we already have (which gets much easier as we discover just what it is we do own) instead of buying new things. We’re sharing what we don’t use anymore with others.

How many times have I bought something I already own because (a) I don’t remember that I have one or (b) I can’t find it? How many times have I bought something I could make or fix because it’s just too much trouble to find the stuff or clear the room I need to do it? How many things have I bought when there’s something I could make do with right here already? How much stuff have we hung onto that could be used by others, so that they buy new things while ours sit in a box unused? How often have I walked away from my house because I’m overwhelmed or unhappy with it, and gotten in the car to escape? How many questions can I write in one paragraph?

So far, decluttering has had the usual green benefits for us. By cleaning out the hand-me-down boxes in Child Two’s closet, we found enough summer clothes in the right size that we didn’t have to buy anything new for her. And when someone posted in our local Freecycle group that her children had become obsessed with My Little Pony, we were able to give her Child Two’s collection and she didn’t have to go out and buy new plastic toys with their associated overpackaging. Instead of replacing our aging plastic kitchen storage containers, we’re making do with the five boxes of mason jars which, for some unknown reason, moved all the way to California and all the way back with us and have been living in the shadows of our shed (I prefer the jars to plastic anyway).

But it’s also having some less obvious effects. The less cluttered our house is, the more enjoyable it is to spend time here and the easier it is to enjoy the things we have. With our summer battle cry of “Use it or lose it,” we’re making a point of enjoying the things we’re finding: the games that got buried in the back of the cupboard, the DVDs the kids got for Christmas that still have the plastic on them, the boxes (and boxes) of unread books. Not only does this keep us from buying more, but it makes home a nicer place to be. More time at home means fewer car trips and less shopping for even more stuff.

Most importantly for the long term, I’m finding that as I put the work into decluttering and as I find out what I already have, I don’t want to buy more and more stuff. I don’t want my house to get more and more crowded. I want to make the projects I bought all the supplies for but haven’t gotten around to. I want to read the books I bought months or years ago with such anticipation. I want to spend time fixing the house and garden up instead of escaping.

And I am much more aware of how much stuff we’ve bought for the wrong reasons. Instead of providing enjoyment, that stuff results in frustration (as I trip over it) or guilt (as I realize we’ve hardly used it) or despair (as I wonder if there will ever be room for a bed in the guestroom).

A neighbour was commenting to me the other day that we could build another story on our house without blocking anyone’s view—in fact, the previous owner had plans drawn up to do just that. Right now, the stuff we own doesn’t fit well in our house. But this is not because we need a bigger house, nor do we need to use a bunch of resources to build and maintain more space or to buy complicated storage solutions. We simply need less stuff.

Wordless Wednesday #22--Jamie

2008-07-23T09:52:00.000-07:00

Taken August 19, 2007, at home.

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

This photo is also being posted for Carmi's Thematic Photographic theme of "animals."

Improg word: Ponytail

2008-07-22T11:34:00.000-07:00

Every Monday a new word is posted on the Improgging site. Visit there to read how others have blogged about this week's word, ponytail.

Too bad this wasn’t the improg word when Child Two donated her ponytails. The Improgging Fool does allow links to previously written posts, but since that post was done for an improg word, I’d better do a new one.

Although my hair is long more often than it’s short (due to my inability to remember to get it cut on a regular basis), I don’t wear a ponytail unless I need to keep it out of my face—or out of the cookie batter, the bread dough, the paint, or the potting soil, or away from the fabric shears or the sewing machine mechanism (I learned that one the hard way—ouch!).

I used to put my hair back so often that I kept a ponytail holder in my pocket all the time. It’s not that I wasn’t busy with other things. I was a full-time student for a ridiculous number of years and I worked part-time and did volunteer work; I had a husband and friends whom I spent lots of time with. But somehow, no matter how busy I was, I sewed for an hour almost every single day. I baked several times a week. I did all sorts of crafts and potted up baby plants and worked in the garden. And my trusty ponytail holder was always at the ready.

The activities I tied my hair back for were the things I loved to do, the things that gave me a break from the reading and writing and working I did most of the time. The very act of putting my hair in a ponytail was a signal that it was time to relax, to have fun while still getting something done. And somehow, no matter how busy I was with work or other people, I made time almost every day for those things.

Now I hardly ever put my hair back. Even when my kids were small and needy, my hair was in a ponytail more than it is now. It’s been a gradual shift from having that holder always in my pocket to having to scrounge around the house to find one on the rare occasions that I need one.

Why is that? My “spare” (i.e., non-work) time now is usually spent taking my kids to an activity or running errands or getting caught up on the work that didn’t get done because my mother wanted me to do something for her—or collapsing on the couch or in front of the computer because after spending the day working and running around, I don’t have the energy for much else.

Slowly, though, during my Year of Living Differently, I’m starting to shift my time back. My kids and I are fixing up the “sewing room” (= room where we put everything that doesn’t have a home) with a table for each of us so we can be together while doing our own thing. I’m trying to spend a little bit of time each day—even if it’s only 15 minutes—doing something creative. I’m rethinking how I run my business and am putting together ideas for some major changes once my current batch of work projects is done. It’s a real challenge and it’s not happening as quickly as I’d like it to, but sooner or later that ponytail holder will be back in my pocket, ready for anything.

Wordless Wednesday #21--Garden fairy

2008-07-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

Taken October 12, 2007, in Vancouver.

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

This photo is also being posted for Carmi's Thematic Photographic theme of "light."

Giveaway on Making Do

2008-07-14T08:40:00.000-07:00

I'm hosting a very small giveaway on my other blog. If you're a crafty type, check it out!

Green Friday--Reusing magazines

2008-07-11T11:25:00.000-07:00

It takes a lot of resources to produce magazines. If I had more time, I would do some research and post all sorts of interesting stats here. But I don’t, so just take my word for it. There's a lot you can do with those resources before you toss your magazines in the recycling bin.

I used to be a magazine junky. Well, I still am, but I try not to use up so many resources to feed my habit. I let all my subscriptions run out because of the junk mail and plastic wrapping that came along with them. I no longer buy magazines automatically or based on the cover (no matter what miracles that cover promises). There have to be several articles I’m really interested in—with information I’ll actually use—before I plunk down my money. If there isn’t, I either pass it up, read it while waiting in line during the dreaded grocery shopping, or check it out from the library.

I belong to a not-so-secret magazine network. My mom and I share a lot of our magazines, and when we’re both done with them, she passes them on to a friend who, after she’s read them, gives them to her daughter, who passes them on to someone else, and so on.

I donate some to our library, where they’re sold on the Friends of the Library book sale table, or to the recreation center, where they’re sold to help pay for adaptive equipment for people with special needs. Other libraries we go to have boxes set up where you can leave your magazines and take others.

I leave them in places where people will be stuck for a while, like laundromats, hospitals, clinics, the car repair shop, and my kids’ music and dance schools. I used leave them in the laundry room of my apartment building or in the staff room at work, back when I lived in an apartment and had a real job.

You can use reuse magazines in other ways, too. Since it’s more efficient to run a full freezer than a partially empty one, use them to fill empty space. Or tear pages into strips to use as cushioning material for packages.

And, of course, I use them for crafts, including making envelopes and calendar journals. Child Two and I are planning to make our own magnetic poetry set from words cut from magazines and flyers and I’m collecting beat-up craft and knitting magazines for a big decoupage project. Both of my kids have done some great art projects at school with magazines, like paper weaving, color collages, and mosaics, and at home we’ve used magazines to make greeting cards and to turn shoeboxes into treasure boxes.

One summer, a little girl I babysat and I made an ABC book out of magazine pictures. (Oh, my. I’ve just realized that little girl is now 34 years old.) I stapled together blank pages, one for each letter, and we glued pictures that she liked onto the appropriate pages. This idea could be used to for all sorts of themes: colors, numbers, simple words, countries, foods, animals, etc.

There are tons of creative ideas for reusing magazines, from sophisticated art pieces to fun ways to spend an afternoon with your kids. I’ve posted some links on my Making Do blog.

We recycle magazines only when they’re tattered and falling apart. Along the way, we’ve shared them with others and had some creative fun—a much better use of resources (and money) than reading them once and throwing them away.

Wordless Wednesday #20--Not a typical mermaid

2008-07-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

Taken September 8, 2007, in Victoria, BC.

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

Improg word: Plethora

2008-07-08T14:03:00.000-07:00

Every Monday a new word is posted on the Improgging site. Visit there to read how others have blogged about this week's word, plethora.

Earlier today, Child Two had an overabundance of hair.

Now it's gone.

She'll be sending her plethora of hair to Eva & Co. Wigs' Hair Donation program, the very place that gave our cousin a free wig just last week.

We can't quite remember how long Child Two's been growing her hair to donate--over a year, we're sure, but less than two. Although it was long enough several inches ago, we had to time the cut so that it didn't interfere with her ballet shows. Now, as the weather is warming up and the next show is months away, and as our cousin is going through chemo, it seemed like the perfect time.

This occasion marked her first real grown-up hair appointment, with a shampoo and a scalp massage and everything. Child Two was relieved that the stylist is as quiet as she is, so she didn't have to make small talk.

She's planning to grow another plethora of hair over the next year or two and then donate it again.

Thematic Photographic--Sky

2008-07-06T11:44:00.001-07:00

Taken February 22, 2008, in West Vancouver, BC.

I'm posting this photo for this week's Thematic Photographic theme, "sky." Vancouver, especially the North Shore, where this photo was taken, can be a gloomy place. But when the sky is blue and full of cotton-ball clouds, the rain (at least for a little while) is forgotten.

We're surrounded here by big things--the ocean, the mountains, the trees--and from some places you can hardly see the sky. But on this day, with my back to the water, the sky seemed huge.

For another Thematic Photographic entry, see this my other blog.

Wish me luck

2008-07-05T08:07:00.001-07:00

I am now officially the mother of a teenager.

Green Friday--The shopping question

2008-07-04T11:09:00.000-07:00

This is “Enough stuff, already!” month around here and the decluttering is in full swing. In addition to getting rid of what we don’t use, we try to minimize the amount of stuff we bring into the house in the first place. It helps that neither my husband nor I are big shoppers. Neither of us feels the need to own the latest fashions or the newest gadgets, and—luckily for us—our kids are the same, at least for now.

One of the most effective ways for us to reduce our consumption is to ask ourselves one question as we’re contemplating a purchase: Do we really need to own this?

Then, because I’m a wordy person, I follow it up with several more: Do we need it at all? Can we make do with something we already own? If we do need it, can we borrow it from someone? Get it from the library? Rent it? Find a used one? Make one?

I still use a bowl over a pot of hot water when I need a double boiler. We borrow or rent tools unless they’re things we’ll use over and over. A great deal of my kids’ clothes are hand-me-downs from their cousins. Child One and I recently made a path from old bricks instead of buying new stepping stones. We rarely buy movies. We share books and magazines with friends and family.

Very often the answer to the shopping question is a resounding “no.”

When my kids started getting an allowance, it came with a big string attached: With the exception of Christmas and birthday gifts, they were now solely responsible for buying their own toys. Now, many years and valuable lessons later, they ask themselves the shopping question. The result is much less plastic crap and packaging filling up our house and our garbage can.

I’m prone to buying certain kinds of things on impulse: notebooks, stationery, craft supplies, books, and magazines. But I’ve recently remembered an old trick I used to use. I walk away. If whatever it is still seems irresistible several days later, then I consider going back and buying it. More often than not I forget all about it.

The ramifications of the shopping question can be much bigger than an occasional magazine or plastic action figure. When we bought this house, we knew we would need to haul in dirt and haul out mountains of laurel branches, bring home new furniture (because we left most of our old hand-me-downs in California), and carry loads of wood and other treasures from the hardware store. We had every excuse to buy a pickup truck, but we decided that we didn’t really need to own one. We borrow one a few times a year or get things delivered instead.

Some people complain that trying to be environmentally friendly is expensive. But we find that the money we save by buying less far outstrips what we spend on green products. You can buy a lot of organic apples for the price of a pickup truck.

Improg word: Smitten

2008-07-03T10:57:00.002-07:00

Every Monday, the Improg site posts the word of the week for your blogging pleasure.

On long car trips, I tell my kids that they shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to use the washroom, even if they don't think they need to, just in case. I follow the same principle when it comes to dictionaries: I rarely pass up the opportunity to look up a word, even if I don’t think I need to, just in case.

As I do almost every week, today I looked up the current improgging word, smitten. And, as I do almost every week, I learned something new—or really, I realized something I hadn’t put together before. I’d always thought of smitten in its meaning of “infatuated,” but, being the past participle of smite, it means more than that. The primary meaning of smite is to strike something with heavy force. The various meanings of smitten share the notion of being struck forcefully, literally or metaphorically. You can be smitten by a thug wielding a hammer, by the plague, by fear, or, like Margerie, by the charms of your kitten and your children.

You might be able to tell that I am smitten by words. I mean this in the love-them-want-to-marry-them sense, but I, like everyone, can also be smitten in the just-got-smashed-in-the-head-with-a-rock sense when words are used as weapons. I’ve been smitten (in the good sense) with language for as long as I can remember—not by literature so much (while I love to read, I am not particularly highbrow in my tastes and will read just about anything), but by the nuts and bolts of language.

I remember the first time I skipped out of school, smoked a cigarette, kissed a boy, had sex, rode a roller coaster, and drove a car (not all at the same time—what a day that would have been!). But I remember just as clearly the first time I realized I was thinking in French—not thinking about French, but thinking my everyday thoughts in French—and the first time I learned about the field of linguistics and realized that I could spend a ridiculous number of years learning about language with people who wouldn’t think I was weird (or, if they did, it was for other reasons entirely). I spent many, many hours of my prime with my head in dictionaries and grammars, learning or analyzing how one language or another worked.

To illustrate just how smitten (= strange) I am, I ask you this: Am I the only one here who wonders why the American Heritage Dictionary and the Nelson Canadian Dictionary say that smite has two past participles, smitten and smote, but the Oxford says it has just one, smitten? Did North Americans start using the past tense as the past participle for some reason, or did the British stop?

And am I the only one here who wants to know why smite, smote, smitten (or smote) doesn't follow the same conjugation pattern as bite, bit, bitten?

And am I the only one here who owns several English dictionaries and looks up words in all of them just to see how they differ? Or who owns dictionaries in a variety of languages that she doesn’t speak, some of which are dead?

Am I smitten or am I a total geek?

Wordless Wednesday #19--Wild daisies

2008-07-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

Taken June 29, 2008, in North Vancouver, BC.

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

Enough, already!--Month five

2008-07-01T11:43:00.000-07:00

Last month’s “Enough, already” theme was multitasking. My experiment in monotasking was illuminating. For the first two weeks of the month I was able to follow my plan very well. Each day I focused on just one of my large work projects, cycling through them during the week. I kept my email closed most of the time and didn’t drop everything when small, urgent jobs came in, but instead allocated time to deal with them. I got way more work done than I normally do—I even got my invoices done for the first time in three months—and I felt much more in control of my time.

Then the last two weeks of the month brought all kinds of end-of-the-school-year activities as well as increased family pressure. The number of interruptions to my work time increased by about a zillion percent. I struggled (unsuccessfully) to get my work done. I went back to feeling scattered. I constantly had a knot in my stomach. In other words, I felt like I usually do: like I’m about to be swallowed alive by demands and worries.

So obviously I’ve learned an important lesson about the better way for me to work.

Now, somehow, it’s July. A couple of weeks ago, my kids and I decided (well, I decided and they agreed) that this would be the summer of getting things done around the house. The theme this month is “Enough stuff, already!” and our motto (well, my motto, since both of them went quite pale at the thought) is “Use it or lose it.” We’ve already started decluttering their rooms, which are much too small for their packratty ways, and I’ve started on the rest of the house.

This theme applies to the yard, too, where we’ve declared “Enough weeds, already!” My work has been so busy this year (and the year before and the year before that and . . . ) that I haven’t been able to keep up with the garden, so this summer I’ve hired the kids to do a lot of the work for me. Child One has recently decided to save up for a Gibson SG guitar—the cheapest used one we’ve seen around here so far is over $900—so he’s motivated.

It won’t be all hard work, though. In the spirit of using it or losing it, we’ll be digging out the games that have migrated to the back of the cupboard. We’ll be setting up the croquet and badminton sets, both of which sat in the shed all last summer. Child Two and I are going to try to use every type of art supply we own at least once before school starts. Our goal this month is not to get rid of everything we own, but to pare it down to the stuff we really want so that we can enjoy it.

And as for my work, I’m definitely taking last month’s lessons to heart.

Thematic Photographic: Wood (again)

2008-06-29T17:13:00.001-07:00

Taken August 21, 2007, in Burnaby, BC.

This is another entry for Carmi's weekly Thematic Photographic theme. This wooden horse is part of a beautifully restored carousel at the Burnaby Village Museum.

Thematic Photographic: Wood

2008-06-28T20:33:00.000-07:00

I'm posting this photo for Carmi's Thematic Photographic theme of wood. This is the very roller coaster that I almost flew out of 27 years ago.

For another wood photo, see my other blog.

Taken September 2, 2007, in Vancouver.

Green Friday--Green Guide magazine

2008-06-27T15:33:00.000-07:00

Green Friday was pre-empted last week. The school year ended for us just yesterday, and as anyone with children in elementary school knows, June—with its year-end performances, field trips, and parties, as well as the last-minute panic to get projects done—is as busy as December, only without so much shopping. Between that, work, and a bunch of nonsense I was going through, I barely had time to brush my teeth last week.

This week I want to tell you about National Geographic’s Green Guide. What I like about this magazine is that it’s aimed at consumers like me, with busy lives and a budget, who want to know what they can do in their everyday lives to have a smaller impact on the environment. It goes beyond the information we’ve all heard a million times but doesn’t expect its readers to grow every scrap of food they eat, use nothing but pedal power, or dress in only organic hemp clothing. In the two issues I’ve read so far, I’ve found information that is immediately usable.

Each issue contains buying guides that tell you what to look for and what to avoid when you’re shopping for everyday items. For example, the summer issue has a guide for shampoos, including a wallet-sized “smart shopper’s card” that lists ingredients linked to health concerns such as cancer and hormone disruption. Other features include comparisons of different versions of a product (for example, is it better, from a nutritional and environmental standpoint, to buy juice as frozen concentrate, in plastic bottles, or in cartons?).

I found this magazine at the grocery store, but I discovered today that you can also subscribe online at the Green Guide website. Even if you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can access the buying guides, smart shopper’s cards, blogs, tips, and a free newsletter on the site. If you're looking for a way to go beyond curbside recycling and using cloth bags, check out the site or the magazine.

Note: No bloggers were paid in the preparation of this review.

Wordless Wednesday #18--Tall Ship

2008-06-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

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

Thematic Photographic: Glass

2008-06-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

I'm posting this photo as part of Carmi's "Thematic Photographic" project. The theme this week is glass. This picture was taken through the window of an old building on the beach in April.

An open letter to late-night callers

2008-06-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

To the young woman who has decided to drunk-dial her ex-boyfriend and got me instead, I’m very sorry for your suffering. And if you call me back at, say, 11:00 in the morning, when I could really use a break from my work, I’ll be happy to listen to you weep and tell me what an ass he is.

To the socialites who call looking for Bob or Barbi or a taxi at 3:00 in the morning, I’m very happy for you that your social life is so full. I can tell you’re having a wonderful time at that party. The music sounds great—whoever is in charge of the stereo is doing a fabulous job. But Bob doesn’t live here, nor does Barbi, and there’s no way I’m getting out of my warm bed to come and pick you up so you can throw up in my car.

To those who are calling the Metro Vancouver area code from the other side of the world, please be especially careful with your dialing. I know it’s a lot of numbers and it’s easy to get one wrong, but consider what it’s like for me to fumble in the dark for the phone and to hear you asking over and over again for your intended party in a language I don’t speak. Here’s a handy tip: If the person who answers the phone clearly doesn’t understand you, you’ve probably got the wrong number. Shouting loudly will not help her find the person you want.

If you happen to be a client of mine and are sending me a fax from Europe or calling me from the East Coast, stop for just a minute and remember that I’m in the Pacific time zone. Where you are it may be a perfectly reasonable business hour, but where I am we are all snoring gently in our beds (except for those who are out partying and calling me for a ride). Keep this in mind: I edit much better and more efficiently when I don’t have to prop my eyes open with toothpicks because I’ve been woken up by your call in the wee hours. I’m also much less cranky when I’ve had a full night’s sleep and therefore less likely to write “Did you never learn grammar in school, you moron?” in big red letters on your manuscript.

I know you’re probably thinking I should just turn the phones off at night so that you don’t have to worry your drunken or thoughtless little heads over waking me. But we have elderly relatives and sick relatives and my husband is part of an emergency response team, so that’s not an option. When I hear the phone ring at night, my first thought is that someone has died or there’s been an apartment-building fire and 50 people need help finding food and clothes and a place to stay. And with all that phone-induced adrenalin rushing through my body, it’s really hard for me to make sense of your weeping or drunken slurring or foreign-to-me language or requests for a rush job.

Please, late-night callers, please, think before you dial.

Wordless Wednesday #17--Waiting for summer

2008-06-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

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

Improg word: Fair

2008-06-17T13:48:00.001-07:00

Improgging is improvisational blogging. A word is posted on the Improg blog twice a week. Take that word and blog about it in anyway you’d like: happy, sad, thoughtful, funny, short, long, with pictures, with words—anything goes! To read other people's interpretation of the current word, go here.

Monday’s posted word was fair. I was thinking about posting about things that are fair and things that aren’t—I could go on forever about this, I bet. But then I started thinking all the fairs I’ve gone to. I grew up going to the county fair and for a dozen years lived in an area that holds a big agricultural fair every summer.

But the best years, fair-wise, were the years we lived in California when our kids were younger. Some people call the area we lived in Wine Country, but to us it was Fair Country. We usually went to five or six fairs every year, starting with the Apple Blossom Fair in April and ending with the Sonoma County Harvest Fair in October. We went to the fair (two, actually) in our first month living there and we went to the fair in our last month living there.

Now I live close to the grounds for the Pacific National Exhibition, known as the PNE. It has a midway and rides (they’re actually there all year), and there are some farm animals, but it’s much bigger and more commercial than the fairs I love. There’s no home ec building where I can see everyone’s strawberry jams or check how many ribbons a friend won for her crafts like I could at other fairs. The vendors are commercial ones. I can’t buy a wall-hanging for my daughter’s room from a member of the quilt guild or a hemp bracelet from a guy with dreadlocks. There are no displays of kids’ science projects or Lego creations. The PNE is fun, but it’s not a community fair.

My stepsister and I liked to go to our county fair during the day when it was quiet, because the guys running the rides would let us stay on as long as we wanted. I still feel bad about the time we were on the Octopus and, thinking we were the only ones, we had the guy keep it going around and around and around, until finally the short kid we hadn’t noticed before threw up.

We were also crazy about roller coasters. Take a lesson from me: Don’t wear a strapless top on a roller coaster, or if you do, don’t put your hands over your head as you go down the big hill. Hello, Santa Cruz!

My kids are not big fans of fair rides and for this I’m kind of grateful. For one thing, as I’ve gotten older, even one round of Ring around the Rosy makes me so dizzy that I have to sit with my head between my knees. I don’t think I could take the Tilt-a-Whirl anymore. For another, we rarely have to stand in line for an hour and a half and pay $5 each to enjoy a 45-second ride.

And once you’ve become a mom, the rides that used to seem so thrilling are downright scary. I was never truly frightened on a roller coaster—not even the time when, with my hands in the air instead of holding onto the bar like a smart person would do, I flew right out of my seat and the guy sitting with me had to haul me back down by the waistband of my jeans—until I took my three-year-old son on the kiddy roller coaster at the Sonoma County Fair. No safety bar seems safe enough when it’s your kid. When were those bolts last tightened? Is that seat belt frayed? As we rode around the Dragon Coaster, a good five or six feet in the air, I had a death grip on his little shoulder.

Soon my son’s class is going on a field trip to the PNE grounds. Having inherited the family pukey gene, he won’t go on the dizzying rides, but he is planning on trying out the very roller coaster that I almost flew out of almost 27 years ago. He’s smaller and skinnier than I was then and if the safety bar is the same, it won’t come anywhere close to his body. But he’s also more sensible than I was (and he’s heard my story), so he’ll probably be holding on. I won’t know for sure, though, because I won’t be able to watch.

Green Friday--Think before you print

2008-06-13T22:13:00.000-07:00

In my day job (which, unfortunately, sometimes spills over into an evening, night, and weekend job), I’m an editor. My work involves words, words, and more words. It also used to involve paper, paper, and more paper, but over the years I’ve cut way back on how much printing I do.

During the first half or so of my ridiculous number of years at university, I simply could not write directly on the computer (I mean compose. I’m not talking about graffiti here). When I tried, I would sit there, my mind as blank as the screen.

It didn’t help that there’s something weird about my eyes or my brain that makes me able to detect CRT monitors refreshing, so that to me it sometimes looks like the screen is scrolling 60 times a second. Given my tendency to motion sickness, this is not a good thing. I often had to go lie down (or worse) during work sessions. A writer and editor who gets pukey looking at a computer screen? About the only thing worse would be a car salesman who gets sick on test drives.

Anyway, when I wrote my master’s thesis, I actually wrote it. By hand. With a pen. On paper. And then I typed the whole damn thing into the computer, printed it up for editing, wrote some more, typed some more, printed it again—rinse and repeat several times. Over the years, though, I’ve developed the ability to think and look at a computer screen at the same time, which is good news for the forests of the world. And now that I have a flat-screen monitor, I rarely throw up while I work.

These days I work on-screen as much as possible. And recently I’ve been questioning every print job before I send it. Do I really need to print a book’s table of contents so I can compare it to the headings used in the text (what an exciting job I have—can you stand it?) or can I copy the TOC (fancy technical abbreviation) into a separate file and view both documents side by side? Do I really need to print a set of style guidelines or can I keep them open in the background and refer to them when I need to? Do I really need to print a whole email or can I jot down the important information on a piece of scrap paper? Do I really need to print a knitting pattern that I may never get around to making, or can I save it on my hard drive?

Of course, words read differently on the screen than on paper, so there are times that I have to print a job to get an accurate reading of it. Once in a while I have a client who prefers to work on paper. Sometimes I have to measure margins with a ruler (see "exciting job" above). And I still tend to print things I’m scared of losing, because my backing-up habits aren’t as good as they could be (shame on me).

Now that I stop and think instead of automatically hitting the print button, a package of paper lasts me an incredibly long time and I have less paper cluttering my office (not to imply that my office isn't cluttered—it's just not cluttered with printouts).

Wordless Wednesday #16--A needed reminder

2008-06-11T08:54:00.001-07:00

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

Green Friday--Dead batteries come back to haunt us

2008-06-05T22:25:00.001-07:00

Batteries contain toxic metals that can leach into landfills and into the environment. In fact, according to the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation, 70% of the heavy metals in landfills is due to household batteries. Wow!

In our house we use rechargeable batteries as much as possible. Every time a single-use battery wears out in something, I ask myself (usually out loud, since I’m so desperate for adult conversation) whether it could be replaced with a rechargeable. The answer (also spoken out loud, of course) has, so far, always been yes. I find that it’s actually easier and cheaper to use rechargeables because we buy so many fewer batteries, and (bonus!) there’s less packaging to throw away.

When your rechargeables finally wear out, you can recycle them. If you’re in North America (and two of my four regular readers are), you can check the Call2Recycle site to find a drop-off site. I was surprised to find out that there are 48 drop-offs within five miles of my house (or, since I’m in Canada, 8 kilometres); several of them are in stores I shop at, and many of them also take old cell phones. 48! Who knew?

In some places there aren’t programs in place to recycle single-use batteries, but some stores, companies, and recyclers do take them. Currently a lot of these batteries are taken to hazardous waste landfills, but now that California has banned batteries from landfills and requires battery recycling, better options might become more widely available elsewhere. My husband’s company collects them, so once in a while I send him to work with a plastic baggy full of dead batteries (if that’s not nerdy, I don’t know what is).

One thing that hadn’t occurred to me until I read a handout produced by the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation was the number of batteries that people unknowingly throw away in phones, toys, and all sorts of gadgets. Now before we toss anything that might remotely have a battery in it, we open it up and check first.

I find that many things that are better for the environment actually save money and take little time and effort. Dealing with batteries is one of these things. We drop them off at places we go to anyway. We buy fewer batteries. Once in a while we have to charge the rechargeables or open something up before we throw it away. Not a lot of work to keep heavy metals out the waste stream.

Wordless Wednesday #15--The Cove

2008-06-04T08:16:00.001-07:00

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

Improg word: Display

2008-06-03T13:11:00.000-07:00

I’ve given myself a limited amount of time to write this entry, so don’t expect much. I’ve made a lot of progress on my neverending work projects in the last few days and have gotten into a groove, and I want to get back to work (yes, you read that right: want to get back to work). While there’s still a long way to go with one in particular, I now believe that, sooner or later, the damn things will be done and I can move on. This is a big improvement on my recent nightmare of sitting in front of this laptop when I’m 83 years old, still working on the same projects.

I’m happy to report that monotasking has been hugely success for all two and a half days that I’ve been doing it. I can’t believe how much I’ve gotten done. The trick now is to not forget that I’m on this monotasking kick because then I’ll start working on three projects at the same time, with 23 files and 16 browsers open at once, while answering my email, checking on blogs, and eating lunch (if I remember to eat lunch, which I don’t always do).

Anyway, I’m wasting precious time here. My improg word this week is display. Unfortunately, I have no funny stories to relate about knocking over grocery-store displays, although it would a typical thing for me to do and I often bump into them with my cart, especially when I get one whose wobbly wheels turn in one direction only. It did occur to me, though, that this word is often used in reference to gardens, so I thought—because I have absolutely nothing interesting to say about the word itself—I would post some pictures of my ~~weed patch~~ garden.

I think I’ve mentioned (but because of the timer ticking away on my desk, I don’t have time to find where) that I garden more by accident and procrastination than by design. Despite that, and despite the fact that Mother Nature is having a senior moment and has forgotten to give us spring weather (Is it right that my furnace is going on in June? I don’t think so), my garden is putting on a decent display, or at least the parts that have managed to rise about the weeds are.

Here is an example of gardening by procrastination. When we moved into this house several years ago, a bunch of dead-looking vines covered the arbor (I’m very excited to have a house with an arbor. I've always wanted one). I made a mental note to cut those stick-like things back, but, as usual, I remembered only when I was somewhere I couldn’t do it, like in the shower or in the interminable grocery-store line-up, or when I didn’t have time, like when I’d pulled into the driveway with exactly 18 minutes to get my kids fed before we had to pull out again. So I never got around to it. Then, when spring came, this happened:

It turned out that those apparently dead vines were a clematis. Actually, they were two clematises (clemati?): this one, which blooms in the spring, and a darker one, which blooms in the summer. Some clemati are supposed to be pruned and some aren’t and I don’t know which kind mine are, or—if they differ in this respect—which of the tangled vines belong to the pruning persuasion and which don’t. So I just leave the whole thing alone and I’m rewarded with this gorgeous display (notice that I worked the word in again) every year. What was another in a long line of put-off tasks turned out to be my favorite part of the whole yard. Here’s another picture:

Now an example of gardening by accident. I was at the garden club’s perennial sale a few weeks ago and bought several kinds of plants that I knew nothing about (and I ask you this: Why do I have a whole library of gardening books and know so little about plants?). They met all the criteria I’m trying to use this year: They were cuttings or divisions from already existing plants, they were in reused plastic pots instead of new ones, and they were being sold to benefit a nonprofit group. So I bought them and planted them and then kind of forgot about them. Two days ago I glanced out of my bedroom window and saw a flash of red near where my done-for-the-year red tulips were. What was it? Did a tulip spring miraculously back to life? No, one of my unknown plants had produced this amazing flower (just ignore the humungous dandelion leaf next to it, please—and all those other weeds that surround it):

The lupine and bleeding heart plants I bought a few years ago to see how they would take to my garden keep coming back—the lupine in all sorts of unexpected places—despite my complete neglect (gotta love perennials):

My time for blogging is up. I have no time to figure out a pithy way to wrap this all up, so I’ll do what I always tell students not to do, which is to just stop writing when they’ve run out thing of things to say. The end.

Enough, already!--Month four

2008-06-01T13:44:00.000-07:00

Alright, how the heck did it get to be June?

It’s now the beginning of month four of my “Enough, already!” project. In the first month I declared “Enough, already!” to procrastination. I’ve learned that I procrastinate when (a) I am overwhelmed with things to do, (b) I lack confidence in my abilities, or (c) I am tired. Or (d) there’s a cat on my lap and I just can’t get up to load the washing machine.

The theme of month two was garbage (I mean real garbage, not that the theme was worthless). It’s been pretty easy to follow through on that one and we continue to find ways to cut back.

This brings us to last month, when I was supposed to stop neglecting myself. If this project came with grades, I would get a big fat F. In red ink. With a big circle around it.

Early in the month I could see that this theme wasn’t working, so as I counted the days until May was over and I could stop feeling like an abject failure, I thought a lot about why it’s so hard for me to take care of myself. I have come to the conclusion that I just have too many damn commitments. Other people might be able to say, “Sorry, but I can’t do this thing that I’ve already said I would do,” and maybe I should do that for my own good, but I am who I am (not to mention that I’m self-employed), and that’s something I can’t do unless there is no other alternative.

For me, the answer to this dilemma is a two-parter: (a) finish the things I’m already committed to and (b) stop myself from getting so overcommitted in the future. I blathered on about this in a recent email to Hayley (yes, I may be an editor, but my emails to Hayley really do go on (and on) like this):

I can’t seem to dig out of this hole—or rather this unending warren of tunnels through which I run and run—of having too many urgent things to do and not getting them or the non-urgent things done. It reminds me of partway through a school term when you have big projects to work on and daily homework to do and exams to study for and quizzes every week and it’s all overwhelming. Plus your house is a mess, except for your closets because you’ve been cleaning them out to avoid your overwhelmedness.

So maybe instead of trying to do everything all at once—neverending (OMG, they are NEVERENDING) projects and real life and taking care of myself and blah, blah, blah—maybe I should pretend it’s the end of term, when just the big projects are left but they are HUGE because you didn’t work on them earlier and now you have three weeks to write a publishable-quality paper on Spanish syntax in a theory you don’t really understand, along with three other major papers (real-life example), and all you want to do is knit.

In school, at this point, I had to do whatever it took to get these things done or I would FAIL, because in many of my courses, 100% of the mark was determined by these papers I had left until the last few weeks (dumb, dumb, dumb, but I did get to watch a lot of hockey while avoiding them). That usually meant that only the very necessary non-paper-writing-related stuff got done. All of my other energy was devoted to getting these papers out of my life. Often I worked 14 to 17 hours a day for a couple of weeks straight, including weekends, taking showers whenever I thought I would fall asleep at the computer. And you know what? I pulled it off every time.

So I think I’m at the do-anything-to-get-done point. I obviously can’t do the 14- to 17-hour days and what counts as very necessary non-work-related stuff is much more than it used to be, but what if I stop trying for balance right now and go for the work-your-butt-off-even-if-you-think-it-will-kill-you approach for a few weeks until it’s all done? And then I would be free—free, I tell you!—of these projects. The neverending would be over!

And then I could go for balance, building a schedule from a clean start.

In order to accomplish this, I need focus, so June is “Enough multitasking, already!” month. As a student, and especially as a mother, I developed an amazing ability to multitask, doing things like grading student papers while nursing my son while eating dinner with the TV on. But I’ve noticed lately that multitasking isn’t working so well for me anymore. I have so many things on the go at once that it’s difficult to build up momentum or finish any given project. I feel like I’m constantly flitting here and there and seeing very little progress anywhere (I didn’t mean to make that rhyme).

I’ve been reading a bit about this and apparently studies are showing that multitasking is often inefficient, because so much time and focus is lost switching back and forth between tasks. The growing buzz is now monotasking—doing one thing at a time.

Now, I’m not going to sit down at the computer and work for a month straight. I have a family to take care of and my son is too young and too short to drive his sister and himself to their activities. Plus, having had a blood clot in my leg several years ago, I need to get up and walk around at regular intervals. But during my work time I will concentrate on one job at a time and keep my email closed. I will choose one relaxing or uplifting thing to do during my clot-preventing breaks each day. And I will put the big questions of balance and taking care of myself and fixing up my house aside for one month until I get out from under the shoulder-crushing weight of these commitments.

I have a hunch that if I can once again pull off an end-of-term success while (and this is very important) not taking on too many future commitments, I will be setting myself up for a more relaxed summer than I’ve had for years. Then I can actually enjoy the process of creating balance in my life instead of failing miserably and beating myself up about it.

Green Friday: Why I bother

2008-05-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

“Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will.” (Michael Pollen, “Why Bother?” New York Times, April 20, 2008).

Do you ever feel like there’s not much point in trying to live in an environmentally responsible way, given the enormity of the problems the world faces and the billions of people who don’t seem to care?

And do you get confused by conflicting opinions on whether you should buy an energy-efficient fridge now to replace your still working energy-guzzler or wait until the old monster has died? (If anybody knows the answer this question, please let me know.)

Does trying to figure out if locally grown but not organic produce is better than imported organic produce make you want to throw up your hands in despair, grab a bag of additive-laden cookies, and collapse in front of the TV?

Even I, who was steeped from a very young age in the belief that if I add my little effort to your little effort, then eventually we can change the world, have days when I feel like this.

I mentioned somewhere on this blog that my husband and I have tried to live in an environmentally responsible way for much longer than it’s been trendy (we’re not very trendy people)—not because we were better than anyone else, but because during our ridiculous number of years at university, we were more aware of the issues than people in the real world. Plus it was cheaper and we were broke.

Some people thought we were freaks (in fact, some members of my family still call me a freak. Hi, Mike! Love you!). But we didn’t much care. We tried to live in a way that felt right to us.

My mom has a list posted in her cupboard that I wrote for her about 20 years ago on things she could do to have less impact on the environment. I was reading it the other day and I realized that some of the things that people used to think were weird or downright wrong, like putting your purchases in your own bag instead of a plastic one, are now mainstream.

I know people who don’t believe that global warming is caused by humans. They say it’s a natural fluctuation. That may be. But even if it is, it’s not a valid reason for not trying to live in a less harmful way. We’ve been aware of environmental degradation since long before global warming became a household concept. Smog alert days, PCBs in the breast milk of women in the Arctic, diminishing resources, overflowing garbage dumps, constant exposure to all sorts of cancer-causing agents—these issues have been around for decades.

To me, it’s not about being on a bandwagon or trying to save the world by myself. It’s about living in a way that’s in sync with my values. I make some choices, like not coloring my rapidly graying hair (which is still in desperate need of a cut—obviously the progress I made during “Enough procrastination, already!” month is wearing off), based on environmental concerns. Other people make other choices. A lot do less than I do and a lot do much, much more.

My efforts alone are not going to save the polar bears or the rainforests. But if I do what I can and you do what you can and my neighbor does what she can and your uncle does what he can, well then, this poor earth—and our descendents—will be better off than if we all did nothing.

What I love about hands-free phones

2008-05-29T10:53:00.000-07:00

I don't have a hands-free phone. In fact, I use my cell phone only a couple of times a week, for coordinating with my husband how two adults with two cars can have two children in three places at one time without a time machine. And, thank goodness, I'm not so very important that I can justify walking around with a phone in my ear all the time. But there is something I love about hands-free phones.

My monkey mind has lots of conversations with people who aren't actually with me at the time. And I compose a lot of stuff in my head--blog entries, email to Hayley, things I want to write (and promptly forget as soon as I have time to sit down at my computer), reports to clients. And sometimes I get so involved with these words in my head that my mouth moves. And being a person of gestures, I might even move my hands.

It used to be that if you saw someone talking to herself, your first thought might be that she was a bit loopy.

"Look, Daddy, that lady in the car next to us is talking to herself. Does that mean she's crazy?"

If she had young kids with her and you were a parent yourself, you might have sympathetically postulated that she'd spent the morning singing "Baby Beluga" 421 times and was so desperate for adult conversation that she'd resorted to talking to the voices in her head.

But now, if you see someone talking to herself, you're likely to assume that you just can't see the phone she's talking on--especially if she's like me, in desperate need of a haircut and with so much hair that I could have phones in both ears and be wearing several pairs of big hoop earrings and no one could see them.

So now, thanks to modern technology, I can talk to myself without embarrassement. If I wanted to, I could even speak out loud and people would just think I'm monopolizing a phone conversation. Instead of worrying that I've chaperoned one elementary-school field trip too many and gone off the deep end, people just assume I'm on the phone.

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday #14--What's around the bend?

2008-05-28T09:32:00.001-07:00

Yesterday my 16-year-old cousin was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma.

I, like everyone, have lost loved ones in my grandparents' and parents' generations to a variety of causes. It's devastating to lose anyone you love, no matter what their age and the circumstances.

I've lost friends and family in my own generation to illness and accidents. It's scary and tragic when someone close to your own age dies.

But this is the generation below me, the generation that's still made up of kids--kids who should be spending the coming summer hanging out and having fun, not fighting cancer or watching one of their own fight cancer. This is just plain wrong.

Because they help me with my volunteer work for Chemo Angels and because we've recently lost someone to cancer, my kids are more aware of this disease than many. But this is the first time it's so close to home, someone they know well. This is their boisterous cousin who is so full of life and energy that she can hardly contain it, a talented artist who draws pictures for my daughter and hands down clothes to her--someone who was fine when she was my daughter's age and fine when she was my son's age, but is not fine now.

Last night my almost-13-year-old son and I had a late-night talk, and I explained the phrase carpe diem to him. We talked about how important it is to really live your life--to not put off the things you long to do or the things you have to do--because you never know what's around the bend.

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

Improg word: Monkey

2008-05-27T11:42:00.000-07:00

I've just noticed that this is my 20th improg post, which means that Hayley and I are about two thirds of the way through our original words. If you'd like to participate in our improg project by suggesting words or improgging yourself (c'mon, Margerie, I know you're wanting to!), let us know.

If this were any other week, I would have groaned after pulling the word monkey out of Hayley’s envelope of improg words. But just yesterday I stumbled across a new blog, iHanna's Creative Space. On Hanna’s “About Me” page was a phrase that made me stop in my tracks: monkey mind. I’d never heard this phrase before, but I was pretty sure I knew exactly what it meant and I immediately Googled it.

Well, my guess was right and—here’s more evidence that I live under a rock—it seems that lots of people already know about it. It’s from the Buddhist analogy comparing a cluttered, chattery, unfocused mind to either (a) a monkey swinging from tree to tree, unable to stay in one spot for long, or (b) a room full of noisy monkeys. Both analogies work for me.

Plans for the future, memories of the past, relived conversations, conversations I’ve never even had, shopping lists, to-do lists, self-recrimination, other people’s criticism, ideas for projects and writing, snappy comebacks I couldn’t think of when I needed them, panic over all that I’m behind on—all of this is going through my mind all the time. Being in my head is like walking through the primate section of the zoo.

I’m largely unaware of the noise or of the tension it causes until something makes it stop. Then I get that sense of ear-ringing relief that comes after leaving a very loud place, like a rock concert, a three-day camp with 13 Brownies, or any social occasion involving a group of almost-teenagers.

One place in which the noise stops is my favorite park. I don’t know why my mind calms down in this particular park. It’s a beautiful spot, with water and trees and trails, but hundreds of parks in this area are beautiful spots with water, trees, and trails. I used to go to this one sometimes the first time I lived here, but my memories of it aren’t particularly quiet ones. In fact, they’re decidedly fuzzy and involve things like sitting on a dock with friends, drinking rum out of paper cups with Ronald McDonald’s picture on them and singing “American Pie” loudly and off-key.

But for whatever reason, when I go to this park, the monkeys get very quiet. It doesn’t matter how awful I feel when I pull into the parking lot, whether I’ve just had an argument with someone or I’m teetering on the edge of the Black Hole of Depression, how much work is waiting for me, or how loudly my clients, my children, or my mother are clamoring for attention. I step out into air and light that seem somehow different and it all stops. For a few minutes I can hear the ringing echo of the voices and I become aware of the tension I’ve been carrying around. And then my head enters the same time zone as the rest of my body and I understand what people mean by “living in the now.”

The other calm, although not quiet, place for me is my belly dancing class. Moving my bottom half in one direction at one speed while moving my top half in another direction at another speed—sometimes while balancing a cane on my head—is all my pea brain can cope with at one time, so everything else just has to stop. Although it sounds kind of funny, belly dancing class was a sanctuary last year when my cousin was dying of cancer. The heavy sadness was there even during class, but for one hour a week my mind could let go of the worry and the stress.

So now I’m looking for more ways to bring the noise down to a healthier and more manageable level. Do you have a monkey mind? What helps you to calm it?

As we saw it

2008-05-24T21:21:00.000-07:00

Earlier today I went to a rummage sale at a church near here, where one of my husband’s best childhood friends got married almost 13 years ago. The bride was a beautiful, exotic, South American girl several years younger than me. We were so happy for them—and relieved, too, that this old friend had chosen someone we truly liked (isn’t it awful when your friends choose someone you can’t stand?).

Child One was about eight weeks old and the wedding was his first big social do. At the time we lived in another town and had to make an overnight trip. What a production that was! We had gone from being a couple who could throw a couple of toothbrushes into a backpack and hop on a motorcycle, to being parents. This baby—who, because he had been premature, was still pretty small—required enough stuff to fill our car from top to bottom. (As a more seasoned parent, I now realize that we only thought he required that much stuff.)

The worst part of it for me wasn’t the worry of travelling with a baby. It was figuring out what I was going to wear to the damn wedding. I was in that awkward stage—my skinny clothes were too small (as they have forever remained), but my maternity clothes were too big. I hadn’t bought anything new, what with being busy learning how to be a mom several weeks before I’d expected to. So I went to the wedding feeling about as frumpy as it is possible to feel, in a long skirt with an elastic waistband and a top through which, I was sure, everyone could see the outline of my nursing pads, with leaky boobs the size of watermelons, circles under my eyes, and hair in desperate need of a cut (hey, those last two are still true today!).

Our friends had a storybook church wedding, in stark contrast to our own backyard wedding, an occasion so dysfunctional that for years my husband and I couldn’t look at the photos without cringing at the stress they brought up. The bride was surrounded by other gorgeous, young women and a big, loving family. The reception was crowded with unmarried, well-dressed people who had slept well the night before, or, if they hadn’t, it certainly wasn’t because they’d been up all night acting as a milk cow. As we walked among these beautiful people with our baby in his little homemade overalls and our god-awful ugly diaper bag, I wanted to disappear into the floor.

Years later I told the bride about how inadequate I had felt that day. And then she told me about how inadequate she had felt about a year later, when she and her husband had come to our town for a visit. She was newly pregnant. There I was, in our own house (a tiny, old, falling-down house, mind you, but our own house), overly educated, making baby food and baby clothes, an experienced mom. Unbeknownst to me, the image of me scooping puréed squash into ice cube trays intimidated her for years. She saw me as some kind of homeowning, supersmart supermom—a real parent.

Really, we’re our own worst enemies sometimes. I felt inferior to her because (as I saw it) she was younger than me, more beautiful than me, more interesting than me. She felt inferior to me because (as she saw it) I was older than her, more of an adult than her, a perfect mom (Ha! Double ha!).

As I stood in the church parking lot today, I wished I could go back almost 13 years and tell that tired and frumpy-feeling new mom that no one would remember what she was wore to the wedding that day or what she looked like (really, when you’re carrying a newish baby wearing overalls printed with cute giraffes, is anybody even looking at you anyway?). Over the years I have been to numerous gatherings with the families of both the bride and the groom and not once have I been greeted with "Oh, you're the one who wore that awful skirt and top to the wedding. I remember that I could clearly see the outline of your nursing pads." I would tell her that the beautiful young bride, once she became a mom herself, would be just as worn out and feel just as inadequate. And I would tell her that she and the beautiful young bride would still be friends so many years later.

Now that we’ve both been mothers for over a decade, with two kids each, the age difference between us means nothing. Nor does the difference in our education, whether we used cloth or disposable diapers, what we look like, or whether we own or rent our homes. The fact that we’ve shared this experience in the parenting trenches, that our husbands have been close friends for almost 35 years, that our children have been friends for all of their lives and will be for years to come, that the two of us can laugh over how we used to see each other and ourselves—these are the things that are important.

Green Friday--Saving water one bucket at a time

2008-05-23T07:07:00.000-07:00

Now that gardening season is upon us, I’ve placed a bucket in the shower to catch the water that would normally go down the drain while the hot water makes its rather slow journey from the water heater to the bathroom. I have a smaller bucket that I use while waiting for water to wash my face. When you multiply these bits of water by four people, it adds up to a lot.

In this blog I tend to complain loud and long that I live in a place with precipitation on an average of 154.5 days a year. So it might seem ridiculous to you that I would try to conserve water. But there’s no point in wasting something just because you have a lot of it and, believe it or not, even here in the temperate rainforest we do have dry spells and summer watering restrictions.

Plus I grew up in California where, it seems, I was permanently affected by the drought of 1976–1977. And lately, as we’ve been watching Frontier House on DVD and I’ve been reading Little House on the Prairie to Child Two, I have apparently been infected with that pioneer waste-not-want-not mentality.

I’m sure that my neighbors must wonder what the heck I’m doing sloshing around the already wet yard (sometimes in the rain even!) with my big red bucket of water. Several spots in our yard don’t get watered by the rain because they’re protected by the eaves or by the branches of the ginormous trees that surround us, so I use my bucket water on them.

A bonus of this scheme is that my haphazard watering habits have improved tremendously. In the typical scenario, I say to myself, “It looks like today will be one of those 154.5 days with precipitation, so why bother watering?” but it doesn’t actually rain and the poor bean plants shrivel. Or I forget about the umbrella effect of the trees. Or I put “water the garden” on my mental to-do list again and again and again while the Shasta daisies topple over with heat exhaustion.

While it appears that I’m normally incapable of getting off my butt to go fill up the watering can or turn on the sprinkler, hauling a bucket of water out of the bathroom and into the yard doesn’t seem to be any trouble at all. And, if it happens to be one of the 210.5 days without precipitation, my red bucket reminds me to water the rest of the yard while I’m out there.

Buttons-n-Dollars

2008-05-22T14:50:00.001-07:00

My good friend Hayley, breast cancer survivor extraordinaire, recently met a woman named Heidi Marble, an eight-year survivor of inflammatory breast cancer. Heidi has established a registered charity called Buttons-n-Dollars to raise money to help under- and uninsured breast cancer patients with their treatment. Using donated buttons and costume jewellery, she turns broken mannequins into works of art, which she then sells or leases.

If you have costume jewellery or buttons that you're not using, please consider sending them to Heidi to help her continue her great work. You know all those mismatched earrings in the back of your jewellery box? And how about your overflowing button box? Declutter your drawers (or for those of us with a teeny tiny craft supply addiction, make room for more) and help Heidi at the same time!

To learn more about Heidi, her book Waiting for Wings, and her art and to find out how you can help, visit her Undone website. Her shipping address is

Heidi Marble
Buttons-N-Dollars
25017 NE 188th Court
Battle Ground, WA 98604

Wordless Wednesday #13--Wishes

2008-05-21T09:23:00.001-07:00

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

Improg word: Order

2008-05-20T11:17:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-13T22:17:00.000-07:00

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

Well, that explains a lot

2008-05-12T12:31:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-09T10:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-07T08:58:00.001-07:00

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

Improg word: Orange

2008-05-06T11:45:00.001-07:00

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.

Green Friday: Buried in junk mail, part 2--unaddressed ad mail

2008-05-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

I used to receive, on average, three or four pieces of unaddressed advertising mail every day—the kind of stuff that gets delivered indiscriminately to every house in the area: flyers for cleaning and gardening services (on my paranoid days, I would wonder if they’d been looking through my windows and peeking into the backyard, thinking “Wow, this woman really needs our help!”), menus for local restaurants, fat envelopes of coupons, and worst of all here in Vancouver, ads from real estate agents.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against real estate agents. In fact, some of my best friends are real estate agents (Hi! Love you!). But do I really need flyers about every house that’s on the market in my own neighborhood? If I want to know how much Myrtle and Joe down the street are asking for their house, I’ll look in one of the three real estate supplements that are delivered with the community newspaper every week.

And I definitely don’t need fancy brochures and glossy postcards advertising the latest skyscraping condo development downtown. I’m not likely to pack up my husband, two kids, three cats, the contents of my sewing room, 12 bins of Lego, seven (or is it eight?) guitars, a piano, and hundreds of books and move them all to a $2 million dollar condo on the 25th floor of the Shangri-La.

One agent here sends notepads to, I assume, everybody in town. They arrive once a month or so whether we need them or not. The funny thing is that when I saw this woman at a community event last summer, I couldn’t figure out at first why she seemed so familiar. For about 15 minutes I wondered why I associated this complete stranger with the dreaded grocery shopping. Was she a checker? Did she work at the deli counter? Then I got it—her picture was at the top of my shopping list!

Canada Post lets you easily opt out of receiving unaddressed ad mail. I did this recently and the very next day noticed a drastic decrease in the amount of unwanted mail I get. No more flyers, no more menus, no more coupons, no more notepads (which is okay with me—I have a stockpile of them), and no more real estate ads. Child One, who is responsible for emptying the recycling box, has had his workload cut in half.

The founders of the Red Dot Campaign are trying to increase the number of Canadians who know about Canada Post’s Consumer's Choice program. Their website gives instructions on how to opt out—the whole process takes about two minutes:

Print this letter and fill it out.

Leave it in your mailbox for your postal carrier.

Make a little sign for your mailbox that says “No junk mail, please” and has a red dot on it. (The please isn’t strictly required, but I’m a mom, and you know how we are about these things.)

That’s it. You’ll get a card from Canada Post explaining the program and how to opt back in if you change your mind.

Canada Post’s opt-out program doesn’t deal with addressed junk mail, the kind that comes from being on a gazillion mailing lists. However, if the 67% of Canadians who aren’t interested in unaddressed ads no longer received them, how many fewer trees would we use?

The Red Dot Campaign’s website directs U.S. readers to Forest Ethics, which has information on efforts to get a similar service started in the States.

Enough, already!--Month three

2008-05-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

Two months ago I declared “Enough, already!” on the things that I have too much of in my life—physical and emotional time and energy zappers—in order to make room for better things. Since I tend to come up with these ideas and then promptly forget about them, I’m giving each month a theme to help me remember.

In March, I declared “Enough procrastination, already!” and got some long-put-off things done. In April, I said “Enough, already!” to garbage. I put more thought into what I bought and how it was packaged. I looked for ways to reuse or recycle things that in the past we’ve thrown out. I now use up food before it moves to the back of the fridge and evolves into a new life form.

Now it’s a new month—time for a new theme. I kicked around a few ideas: clutter, driving, shopping, blah, blah, blah. But I knew that I was avoiding what I really need to do most—I’ve been avoiding it for years. I concentrate on improving my physical environment or aspects of my personality that are holding me back or my appalling lack of time management skills, but I ignore the engine that runs the machine of my life: me. As I wrote the other day, my emotional underwear is in tatters and it’s because I just don’t take care of myself.

Although I come from a long line of martyrs and I probably sigh more than most people, I don’t ignore my health through some sense of martyrdom. It’s partly due to habit. When I was younger, I spent a lot of time and energy doing things that weren’t good for me, and although my biggest vices now are chocolate and Coke (the kind that comes in a can), I never quite got the hang of treating my body well. And part of it is that, as the saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease; in my busy life of kids, clients, mother, accident-prone cats, endless laundry and grocery shopping, etcetera, I’m not the squeakiest wheel.

I’ve read the women’s magazines and parenting books that tell me that unless I take care of myself I can’t take care of anyone else. I recognize how too much stress and too little sleep, exercise, and proper nutrition affect me (and sometimes, unfortunately, those around me). It doesn’t require a PhD to figure this out—I’ve known it for years. I just need to make it a priority. So this month's theme is "Enough neglecting myself, already!" (not catchy, but the best I could come up with in my present overtired, stressed out, anemic state).

I’m inspired to finally do this by someone near and dear to me (if you’re reading this, you know who you are. Hi! Love you!) who recently made a big decision to put his health and well-being first. The change in him has been amazing.

So I’ve made five promises to myself (not rules, because I’ll rebel against my own authority and break those right away): to get enough sleep, to eat better, to exercise regularly, to spend some time every day doing something I love, and to find ways to reduce and manage my stress level. For this month, as I go about my daily life of work and chores and driving to and fro, I’ll try to listen to my own body and give it what it needs.

Wordless Wednesday #10--Lone Walker

2008-04-30T08:09:00.001-07:00

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

Improg word: Underwear

2008-04-29T16:06:00.000-07:00

*For those of you wondering what the heck an improg is, it’s an improvisational blog entry. My improg partner, Hayley, came up with the idea of sending each other an envelope full of words. Once a week, we each pull out a word and write something about it.

You can be part of the fun! Leave a comment, submit a word (see Hayley’s post here for instructions), or—if you’re really brave—you might even like to become an improgger yourself. We’d be happy to have you join us!

Thanks so much, Hayley, for including underwear in your envelope of words.

I have nothing interesting or funny to say about my own underwear. Nor do I have pictures to share. I can hear your collective sigh of relief.

The interesting thing about underwear is that what people wear under their clothes may have little to do with the image they present to the world. Maybe that mom in the grocery store is sporting silk and lace under her sweats. Maybe that tired-looking woman with the bad haircut you see on the bus every day wears leopard-print thongs. Maybe the hot young thing down the street favors granny panties. Maybe your boss wears no underwear at all under his three-piece suit. (I had such a boss many years ago. Unfortunately, his lack of support in the nether regions was all too obvious.)

What the world sees on the surface might not be a complete representation of who we are. That busy, efficient woman you admire so much, who seems so organized, so together? Maybe underneath she’s clinging on for dear life. That near-perfect family next door? Maybe behind their front door is a house full of cold silence and repressed anger. That guy who works at the convenience store? Maybe in his home country he was a brain surgeon and inside his head is the knowledge needed to save lives, if only he could use it here. And that tired looking woman on the bus? Maybe she’s so tired because she moonlights as a belly dancer.

People often dress themselves—both figuratively and literally—in what others expect them to wear. We moved across town when I was a teenager and my friends at my new school—a rather unwild bunch—would have been shocked to know the shenanigans I got up to with my friends from my old neighborhood after church. When I decided to go to university after a couple of years working for the inadequately clad boss, a lot of the people I worked with were surprised, thinking of me as a ditzy blonde waitress with a fondness for parties. During my (ridiculous number of) years at university, some people were surprised to hear of the trouble I got into during high school, thinking of me as a brainy, hippy-type academic.

The people I know now are surprised about both my colorful past and my (ridiculous number of) years at university. And, yes, they’ve even been surprised by my underwear. At Brownie camp a couple of years ago, as the other leaders and I got ready for bed, one exclaimed at what was under my jeans. Although it wasn’t particularly racy (this was Brownie camp, after all), I guess it wasn’t what she expected me to be wearing. All this surprise over the idea that I had adventures in my youth or was an academic or wore black bikinis with white polka dots makes me wonder just what image I’m currently projecting—boring, not very smart, someone who wears white briefs up to her armpits?

I told Hayley that I probably wasn’t going to do an improg entry this week because I’ve been having some hard days lately. I used to frequent a dark hole of depression, sometimes bringing along enough camping equipment and food to stay there for weeks. In the past several years, I’ve teetered on the edge at times, but for the most part I’ve kept my footing. A few days ago I fell in head first. I’ve been sitting here in the dark (illuminated yesterday by a brilliant ray of sunshine in the form of an email from Margerie’s daughter, who invited me to her birthday party), eating cookies and not feeling like doing much of anything.

But then I pulled out this ridiculous word from Hayley’s envelope, and in between my regular chauffeuring duties and work, I’ve sat here in the dark hole thinking about it. And I’ve realized that I might look okay on the outside—a little frumpy, maybe, and in desperate need of a haircut, but still okay—but on the inside my emotional underwear is tattered and torn. I’ve been trying to patch it up, with a stitch here and a stitch there and a safety pin in the elastic, but it’s not working anymore. (Oh, and just so you know, my actual, physical underwear is not in such bad shape.)

I’ve been working really hard to improve things in my life this year, but, just like with clothes, no matter how nice the stuff on the outside, I won’t feel truly comfortable or confident if I’m wearing worn-out underwear that’s threatening to fall down around my knees.

Green Friday: Buried in junk mail, part 1--catalogues

2008-04-25T10:50:00.001-07:00

I, as you might know, am postally obsessed, but even I hate getting junk mail.

Twenty or so years ago, when environmentalists were seen as long-haired, wacky university students, my husband and I (who were long-haired university students) did some wacky things to slow the flow of junk mail coming through our mail slot. We stuffed it into postage-paid envelopes and sent it back. We regularly sent huge envelopes of it to the federal minister of the environment, asking for regulations or programs to be set up to reduce unwanted mail. Glossy paper wasn’t recyclable then, so I would call companies that sent glossy advertisements and (politely) berate them.

It’s gotten a bit easier to say no to junk mail. In this post I’m going to talk about the fattest, heaviest form of junk mail there is: the mail-order catalog.

According to Catalog Choice, producing the 19 billion catalogues mailed to U.S. households each year uses 3.6 million tons of paper made from 53 million trees. The energy used to make this paper is enough to power 1.2 million homes for a year; 5.2 million tons of carbon dioxide are emitted (that’s equivalent to a year’s worth of emissions from 2 million cars) and 53 billion gallons of waster water are produced (that’s 81,000 Olympic-sized pools).

Yikes! How much of those resources is going straight from the forest and factory into the garbage without serving any useful purpose?

Of all the catalogues that get crammed into our dinky mailbox, only one ever gets read: my daughter spends hours poring over her American Girl catalogue four times a year. The rest get a cursory glance to see if there are any pages that would be good for making envelopes or for a craft project, and then they go straight into the recycling box (well, truth be told, more often than not they sit around on my office floor for quite a while before that cursory glance).

If I want to browse a retailer’s catalogue, I do it online. It’s true that you can’t curl up on the couch with a cup of tea and an online catalogue the way you can with a print one, or bring it into the bathroom with you. But it saves resources and I spend less money. Instead of a beautiful glossy catalogue arriving unexpectedly in the mail to tempt me to buy things I wouldn’t otherwise have thought of buying, I go online when I need something.

Even though we don’t read them, we still receive a lot of catalogues. We even get them addressed to people who lived here years ago. Since this is “Enough garbage, already” month for me, I’m adding another step to my glance-and-toss catalogue processing routine: finding out how to stop them from arriving at all. As each one arrives, I contact the company and ask to get off their mailing list.

If you live in the United States, there’s an easy way to stop receiving catalogues you don’t want or duplicates. At Catalog Choice, you can ask to be removed from the mailing lists of approximately 200 merchants who have pledged to honor your request (thanks, Hayley, for this information).

Keep in mind that merchants don’t want to give up your address, especially if you have purchased from them in the past. It may take some time and perseverance to get off those mailing lists. But more and more retailers are waking up to the fact that sending catalogues to people who don’t want them is a waste of resources and money.

Wordless Wednesday #9: Ready, Set, . . .

2008-04-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

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

Improg word: Complete

2008-04-22T20:20:00.000-07:00

For those of you wondering what the heck an improg is, it’s an improvisational blog entry. My improg partner, Hayley, came up with the idea of sending each other an envelope full of words. Once a week, we each pull out a word and write something about it.

You can be part of the fun! Leave a comment, submit a word (see Hayley’s post here for instructions), or—if you’re really brave—you might even like to become an improgger yourself. We’d be happy to have you join us!

The word I pulled today is complete. Now, Hayley hasn’t specified if this is the adjective or the verb, so I guess it’s up to me to decide. Complete (v.) has actually been on my mind lately, so I’ll go with that.

For several years now I’ve had trouble completing things. As far as I can remember, this was not a problem I had when I was a kid, probably because in our house it wasn’t allowed to be a problem. We had to complete things. If we took a toy out, we had to put it back before we took out another one. Chores had to be done first—and that meant done, complete, finished. No forgetting to put the vacuum back in the closet or leaving a fork unwashed at the side of the sink.

So as a kid and a teenager and a young adult, I finished what I started. I read one book before starting the next one. I even finished one craft project before starting the next one (yes, I really did). When I went back to school, I completed assignments days ahead of the due date. That was just the way I lived.

And then I moved in with my husband. He is not a natural finisher, nor does he do things in a linear manner. We once shared a community garden plot with friends of ours, one of whom had a very rigid way of doing things. When we broke the sod on the plot, she worked in completely straight lines, left to right, left to right; my husband worked a bit over here and then a bit over there and then somewhere else entirely. When we planted, she drew straight furrows in the dirt and measured out planting holes according to the distance recommended on the package; he was happy to scatter the seeds in a vague line. He drove her nuts.

So when I moved in with him, I relaxed a bit. Well, a lot. I still got my assignments done on time, but rarely early. I soon had several craft projects on the go at all times. I no longer lived by a strict get-this-done-before-you-start-that rule.

Once I had kids, my problems with completion really grew. Over the next few years, between being sleep deprived and constantly having to change a diaper or clean up regurgitated milk or answer a question like “Where do the stars come from?” or watch impromptu concerts and plays, I really didn’t have time to finish anything in one go. I did manage to complete some things, most notably two degrees, just not very efficiently. And many, many things went unfinished. But I thought that the problem would resolve itself once my children went to school.

Alas, no. They've been in school for years now and I still don't complete things. My life is still full of interruptions. Worse than that, somewhere in all those loads of laundry I seem to have misplaced my ability to focus on the task at hand (it’s probably with all those socks that go missing in the dryer). I dither. I dilly-dally. I take on too much and flit from one thing to another. I have the attention span of a toddler.

One of my goals in my Year of Living Differently is to rediscover my ability to complete what I start and to learn to let go of things that I really don’t want to be doing. I don’t want to live by an inflexible rule—there’s a lot to be said for having 15 projects to choose from at any one time. But I do want to complete the things that are important to me.

As for the adjective, I hope I never feel truly complete. If I were to die in an avalanche of dust balls as I opened the hall closet one day, I would like to feel satisfied with my life. The quest for that feeling of satisfaction is what’s driving me in this year-long project. But I don’t want to feel like I’ve done all I want to do, been all I want to be, read everything I want to read, seen everything I want to see. I don’t want to get to the point where the world isn’t interesting to me anymore, where I feel like I’ve done it all.

Green Friday: Disposing of Medications

2008-04-18T09:52:00.000-07:00

Due to popular demand (well, Margerie), on Fridays I share some ideas for how to lessen our impact on the environment. But I don't have a PhD in this, so please share your own ideas with me!

As part of my “Enough garbage, already!” month, I weeded our medicine box of expired medications. This brings up the question of what to do with them. We used to be told to mush them up and put them in the garbage or to flush them down the toilet so no kids or animals would accidentally ingest them.

However, recent studies have found traces of medications in the water of cities all over North America. In fact, although this has been big news lately, it’s not new news. Back in 2004, the Vancouver Sun reported on a study that found traces of nine drugs, including Prozac, in drinking water plants in Ontario, and mentioned that the US and European countries had been studying this issue longer than Canada had.

Nobody knows what effects the long-term exposure to traces of medications in the water, soil, and, potentially, the food supply could have on our health, not to mention on the health of wildlife, or whether throwing antibiotics away could contribute to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Some experts say there’s no need to worry, but we’ve heard that about pesticides, hormones, and plastic, all of which are a cause for concern now. So, to me, it makes sense to look for safer ways to get rid of those bottles that have been collecting in the back of your medicine cabinet.

This year, the 21 municipalities of the Metro Vancouver area banned the disposal of any kind of medications in the garbage. Here in BC, we’ve been lucky enough to have a free medication return program since the 1990s. You can bring expired or unused prescription and over-the-counter medications to almost any pharmacy (95% of the province’s pharmacies participate) for safe disposal. In 2006, almost 20 tons of medication were kept out of the landfills and the water through this program. I bet the potential is much higher, since a lot of people here don’t even know the program exists.

When we lived in California for a few years, I assumed I could do the same thing there, but when I asked, the pharmacists looked at me like I was crazy (I'm sure I looked crazy, since I'd just finished grocery shopping with a toddler and a baby in tow) and told me to flush them. Things are changing, though, and medication return programs like this one are popping up all over. If you don’t have a program in your area, find out if you can dispose of medications through your city’s hazardous waste program. If you live in Canada, you can find information on how to dispose of medications at the Medications Return Program website.

If you want to read more about this issue, here are a couple of resources:
US Environmental Protection Agency: Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Products
Health Canada: Proper Use and Disposal of Medication

Wordless Wednesday #8: View through the gap

2008-04-16T06:58:00.000-07:00

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

Improg word: Jungle

2008-04-15T13:25:00.000-07:00

It’s a jungle out there, they say. But what I’d really like is for it to be a jungle in here.

I used to be surrounded by plants. I bought the little spindly ones that nobody wanted and nursed them to health. I watered, I fed, I trimmed. I rooted dozens of geranium cuttings every winter. I planted seeds. I forced bulbs so that I could have a little bit of spring in my house in the winter.

And then this guy came into my life:

WANTED: JAMIE (a.k.a. MR. TROUBLE or CALAMITY JAMES)

FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE PLANT KINGDOM

Who knew that when I chose this innocent-looking kitten from the shelter two and half years ago, I was sentencing myself to years of empty pots and vases?

He may look cute, but plants tremble at the mere sight of him. And he’s not interested in eating the plants. No, his crimes are senseless and twisted. He’s been known to bite the heads of gerbera daisies for the sheer fun of it, leaving the poor flowers dying in the soil as he runs off to find his next victim. He scaled the yucca cane plant to tear the leaves apart with his bare teeth. He will climb onto any perch, no matter how precarious, to wreak havoc.

He is sometimes aided and abetted by this terror:

WANTED: LITTLE BIT (a.k.a. GRASS PUKER)

FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE PLANT KINGDOM AND PUKING ON THE CARPET

Doesn't she look fierce? At least she seems to be driven by that strange cat instinct to eat plants and then throw them up. If we keep a healthy crop of cat grass growing, she’ll usually leave the other plants alone. Jamie isn’t interested in that grass stuff. It poses no challenge to his criminal mind.

There are three plants (besides the cat grass) left in our house: a lonely spider plant hanging in my office, with every tip that's within reach of a cat standing on the bookcase or filing cabinet gnawed off, and two pokey cacti. Every other plant has either met a grisly death or has been placed, for its own protection, outside. Few of those have survived our winter temperatures.

Spraying Jamie with water works temporarily, but as soon as our backs are turned he strikes again. The same with shouting or banging on pots. The pet store owner recommended a bitter-tasting spray, but within minutes of my spraying the plants, the Plant Slayer was at work again. Thinking there was something wrong with the spray, I tasted the teeniest tiniest littlest bit, and then spent the next hour brushing my teeth and spitting to get the taste out of my mouth.

On the rare occassions when someone sends me flowers, I can’t keep them inside. One unexpected benefit of living with the Plant Slayer is the discovery that flower arrangements placed outside the kitchen window in the cold weather last for weeks.

When we bought this house with its huge yard, I thought I would finally achieve my goal of having a beautiful cutting garden and a house full of flowers all summer—my reward for living in the gloomy gray rain for an average of 154.5 days of the year. And I thought the big windows would be perfect for the jungle of houseplants that would brighten those rainy days. But that’s not to be.

I bought an outside plant cart with a little greenhouse cover, which will hopefully protect our seedlings enough to get them through any late frosts. Now I’m planning to build some window boxes and I’m collecting interesting glass jars to use as outdoor vases during the summer.

It’s funny—I’ve found lots of resources on how to protect your cats from poisonous plants, but I can’t find anything to tell me how to protect my plants from the cats. I would love to have my jungle back. It’s good for the air quality in the house, but more importantly, it’s good for my soul. If you have any ideas, leave a comment!

Green Friday: Tea for one, not two (or twenty-two)

2008-04-11T07:19:00.000-07:00

Due to popular demand (well, Margerie), on Fridays I share some ideas for how to lessen our impact on the environment. But I don't have a PhD in this, so please share your own ideas with me!

This is how I used to make tea: Working diligently on a client’s manuscript, I’d come across an especially disorganized section or a sentence that made me want to bang my head on the keyboard. I’d think, “I need a cup of tea” (procrastination by tea). As I looked out the window or tried to reach the cookie jar with my other hand, I’d stick the kettle under the tap, and then I’d plug it in and wander away. I would come back five or ten minutes later, discover that the water had already started to cool off, turn the kettle back on, and wander off again. Sometimes it took me three tries to make a cup of tea.

Then one day as I was wandering around in Blogland (procrastination by blog reading), I came across Green Me’s post on tea kettles. And I started paying attention to what I was doing.

I regularly filled the kettle with enough water for a whole pot of tea. Combine that with the mineral deposits in my kettle and my apparent inability to keep a thought in my head for the time it took the kettle to boil, and I was using enough energy for the Mad Hatter’s tea party just to make a single cup.

Now I fill the kettle only to the minimum line and I stick around while it boils. As a side benefit, I’ve cleaned out the fridge, perused forgotten recipe books, and started decluttering the cabinets—all a few minutes at a time.

I also keep my kettle clean. Before, I descaled my kettle (removed the mineral deposits) intermittently, meaning once or twice a year. Green Me gives instructions for descaling, but this is how I’ve always done it (when I’ve actually gotten around to doing it): Fill the scaly part of the kettle with straight white vinegar and boil it. Rinse the kettle well, fill it to the same level with clean water, boil it again, and give it one more rinse. If it’s that easy, why didn’t I do it more often?

Being the procrastinator I am, I drink a lot of tea. I look for fair trade brands without envelopes, strings, and tags. A reusable box or tin gets bonus points. I buy organic and loose tea whenever possible. Once in a while I buy teabags that are individually wrapped if that’s the only way I can get a certain kind or if I’m going to share it with a far-away friend. Nice people send me tea, too. I save all the envelopes to use in as-yet-in-my-head craft projects or to send to someone I know who collects them, or, at the very least, I recycle them. The tea itself goes in the compost.

I don’t drink coffee (yuck!), but you could apply the same principle of awareness to making that awful drink. Are you brewing a pot when you’ll drink only a cup or two? And how about when you boil water for pasta or fill the sink to do dishes or run the bath for you kids? Do you really need that much or could you make do with a little less? Now that I’m paying attention when I turn on the tap, I’m using less water and less energy. And since I’m not boiling the kettle three times for each cup, I have more time to procrastinate by blogging.

Wordless Wednesday #7

2008-04-09T08:30:00.000-07:00

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

Improg word: Shimmery

2008-04-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

This word makes me think of romance and glamour: A dinner in a fancy restaurant, with diamonds sparkling in the shimmering candlelight. A bride wearing a shimmery veil. Evenings spent in front a flickering fire. Lying on a warm beach near the blue shimmery water.

I write about romance and glamour in the same way I would write about quantum physics. To me, they’re theoretical concepts, things of which I have little direct experience.

The only time I see candlelight is when the power goes out. I have no diamonds (we were both broke undergrads when we decided to get married, so I have a thin gold wedding band, the cheapest the jewelry store had). I wore a cotton dress bought three days before my wedding (and I would have worn my jeans if I could have gotten away with it)—no shimmery fabric or veil. The chimney hasn’t been cleaned in years, so we have no fires casting their shimmering light in our living room. And at this time of year the only shimmery water I see is a puddle with an oil slick in it.

I didn’t write this improg yesterday morning because, moments after pulling the word out of Hayley’s envelope, I noticed that one of the cats had thrown up on the stair rail, over the edge of the stair rail, and into the basket of library books. As I cleaned each book page by page—I have been the recipient of gross surprises in library books and I didn’t want anyone else to have that traumatic experience—I thought about this romantic and glamorous word and I had to laugh. There is no shimmer in my life.

This doesn’t mean that my life isn’t filled with light. The flash of coins on hip scarves at my dance class. The stage lights at my kids’ performances. The soft light that I’ve spent countless hours reading to them by. The nightlight I leave on to guide sleepy feet to the bathroom. The light of my computer screen, which connects me to far-away family and friends. The brilliant sunshine which, when it finally breaks through the clouds, turns this grey, gloomy city into one of the most beautiful in the world.

My life is full of light—it’s just not the shimmery kind. And that's fine with me.

Green Friday--Driven to distraction

2008-04-04T11:51:00.000-07:00

As I sit down to write my first Green Friday post, as suggested by Margerie, I feel like a big fraud. I’m no expert on this stuff—who do I think I am, anyway?

But I know that I can use regular reminding of how to live in a more environmentally responsible way, and I bet that’s true for other people. Maybe you’ll read something here that you didn’t know and you’ll share ideas with me that I didn’t know. At the very least, these posts will make me accountable for my own behavior. I know that you can’t see me and wouldn’t have a clue if I threw away a whole ream of paper or started driving a Hummer, but I’ll behave better thinking that you’re keeping an eye on me.

While not old enough to have been official hippies, my husband and I have had the reputation of being hippie-ish, especially since we spent a ridiculous number of years in university, living in apartments with brick-and-board bookcases, wearing big wool sweaters from Guatemala, and carting around our own mugs long before it became the thing to do. Although global warming wasn’t in the news back then, we tried to live in an environmentally friendly way. Our lifestyle didn’t seem extreme to us or our friends, although I think it did to our families. We didn’t give up everything but granola or anything like that. It just made sense to try to have a smaller impact on the planet. Plus it was cheaper to live that way and we didn’t have a lot of money (see “we spent a ridiculous number of years in university” above).

One of the big changes in our lives since then is how much we drive. Before we had kids, we spent some years riding a motorcycle, some years driving various on-their-last-leg cars, and some years with no vehicle at all. Even when we had wheels, we often took the bus (motorcycle + BC weather = sitting in class in wet jeans = extreme discomfort) or walked. Although I got my license when I was 19 (just barely managing to pass the driving test), I didn’t actually start driving until I was 30 and pregnant and saw a woman trying to board the bus in the pouring rain with an unhappy baby, a stroller, an umbrella, a diaper bag and two bags of groceries.

Even after I started driving, I walked to the grocery store, the library, the fabric store, the park—many of the place I went to regularly. But then we moved to California and driving took on a new importance. Nothing, not even Child One’s school, was within walking distance of our subdivision.

Now, back in BC, our days include kids’ activities that we have to drive to. The library is not within easy walking distance (nor is the fabric store) and it’s not so easy to get the groceries without the car. My mom needs to be driven places she’s not confident getting to on her own. All of this means that my car could be my second home.

When the kids were small, we had to stick around at their activities in case of bathroom breaks or sudden I-hate-ballet/art/soccer tantrums. Now that they’re old enough to go to the bathroom on their own, we still stay, now in order to cut down on our driving. I might run an errand close by, go for a walk, hang out with mom-friends (and have conversations that don’t involve bathroom humor), or bring something to do while I’m waiting. I actually look forward to these breaks.

But until recently I was still spending a huge amount of time going here and there, doing this and that. Not only did this completely fragment my work day, but it involved a great deal of driving. Now I try to group my errands and get as many as possible done in one trip. This has drastically reduced my driving and saved me a ton of time and gas money.

It’s had other benefits too. One of the reasons I was always running around was because I work at home and my work can be mentally intense—sometimes I just need a break or a change of scenery. Now, instead of thinking, “Hey, I can go buy milk,” I work in the garden for a few minutes, go for a walk, knit a few rows, or even do the vacuuming (imagine that!). I get the break I need in a shorter time, and I spend that time doing some of the things I never seemed to have time to do before.

Another reason for my chicken-with-her-head-cut-off behavior is that when it occurs to me that, say, I need something at the store, that idea stays in the front of my mind, taunting me until I get it done. Paradoxically, this feeds right into my tendency to procrastinate. There I am, working on something boring or difficult and a thought pops into my head: “My washout fabric marker ran out last week. I need a new one, right now.” I try to ignore it, but it keeps coming back. So I leave the job I don’t really want to be doing anyway, telling myself that I have errands to run.

Now I say to myself, “Self, you know you don’t really need a new washout marker at 1:00 on a Tuesday afternoon. It can wait. You won’t even be able to use it until this never-ending job is done. This is just a ruse to get out of working.” And I sigh and get back to work. I keep a list in my purse of these needs and take care of them while I’m running other errands in the same area. I get more work done (well, when I'm not reading blogs) and save time. Sometimes I realize that I don’t really need or want whatever it was, so I save money, too.

But the biggest benefit—in addition to the environmental ones, of course—is that my days seem less urgent and I feel more in control. A little thought, a little planning, and I get things done in fewer trips and I don’t feel like I’m constantly rushing around.

This post turned out longer than I meant it to. Procrastinating through blogging seems to have replaced procrastinating through driving.

Wordless Wednesday #6

2008-04-02T07:49:00.000-07:00

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

Enough, already!—Month two

2008-04-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

Last month, in a flash of insight probably induced by eating (rather than selling) too many of my son’s choir’s fundraising chocolate bars, I decided to declare “Enough, already!” to the things that I have too much of or that are zapping my energy, in order to make room and time for the things I want more of. So that I can actually remember that I’ve decided to do this, I’ve planned to give each month a theme.

Last month it was “Enough procrastination, already!” I made a list of five things I’d been procrastinating about and did four of them. The fifth required input from someone else who obviously didn’t get as jazzed about my catchy theme as I did. That’s okay, though, because this isn’t about perfection (I keep telling myself), and I got several other left-on-the-back-burner things done as well. I’ve also become more aware of when I’m about to procrastinate and why I do it. For example, I put off preparing my invoices because (a) I usually feel like a big faker who can’t possibly deserve being paid and (b) I hate asking people for money. So now I’m on the road to improving my procrastination habit.

This month my theme is “Enough garbage, already!” I recently took a trip to the local dump, which was surprisingly—both to me and to the people who saw me cry—traumatic. I’m not sure why I reacted so strongly. I grew up close enough to my hometown dump that we could hear the hum of the bulldozers (when the hum of the freeway and the roar of the airplanes overhead weren’t too loud). I used to go there periodically with my dad and, as far as I remember, I didn’t cry then. And it’s not like I’m unaware that people throw things away. But for whatever reason, this trip got me to thinking about garbage in a serious way.

For this month’s “Enough, already!” I’m going to interpret the theme of garbage broadly. First, there’s the physical garbage—what we bring into our house and what we get rid of (and how we do it). Second, there’s the garbage I put into my body (see “empty box of fundraising chocolate bars” above). While it’s not entirely the same kind of garbage I put into my body in my youth, it’s still not good for me. And third, there’s emotional garbage taking up too much room in my life. Some of it has been rotting for years and new stuff gets produced regularly. It’s time for it to go.

After reading my post on going to the dump, Margerie emailed me to suggest that I start a “Green Friday” post of environmental tips. She said she could sense my passion for the subject, which might have been a diplomatic way of saying, “It’s not normal to cry at the dump, you dork!” I love this idea, but as I said in that post, even though we’ve been trying to live in an environmentally friendly way for decades (ouch), I’m no expert. So maybe you all can help me by posting your own tips or sending me suggestions. Not one to procrastinate (ha!), I will start this Friday.

Improg word: Small

2008-03-31T12:04:00.000-07:00

I don’t know how Hayley does it. It’s been months since she sent me her envelope of words, but somehow almost every time I pull one out, it’s got a message that I need to hear on that particular day. A case in point is today’s word, small.

I have been in a funk for the last couple of days, ruminating, as I sometimes do, on the fact that the big things in my life are not really what I want them to be. If you know me well (that’s you, Hayley), you have some idea of what I’m talking about. If you don’t, suffice it to say that there’s quite a gap between my ideal life and the one I’m living.

When I get in one of these moods, I try to keep my perspective (instead of falling into the black hole of depression which has claimed too much of my time in the past) by reminding myself of two things. First, the challenges I face at this point in my life are very, very small compared to what probably 95% of the world’s population is experiencing. And second, most people could truthfully say that at least some major part of their life is not going quite as they’d like it to. That’s just life. And then I sigh a bit (a habit faithfully passed down among the women on my mother's side) and get on with my day.

When I unfolded the little slip of paper with Hayley’s word on it this morning, a third thing occurred to me. Concentrating on the big issues makes the gap between the life I would live if my fairy godmother ever showed up and the life I live in the real world seem huge. But if I look at the small things instead, I find that many of the details of my wishful-thinking life and my real life are the same.

And then I thought of a fourth thing (four thoughts in one morning—it must be that extra cup of tea I had). I already know that I can change some of the big things in my life that aren’t right and I can’t change others. Figuring out the changes I want to make is one of the goals of my Getting My Shit Together project, and so is making peace with the things I just have to deal with. Here’s the thing: how well I do both of these depends on my attitude, which in turn is heavily influenced by all the small things I experience every day. So, with this caffeine-inspired wisdom, I’m focusing today on the small things—the everyday things that make me feel happy or capable or confident.

Here are some of the good small things in my life:

hanging out with my kids

mail from a friend

talking to my brother and sister-in-law on the phone (this is not a hint, by the way, if either of you are reading this)

chocolate

tea and chocolate at the same time

books (although the piles of books in our house are very large things)

yarn, fabric, buttons, thread

books about yarn, fabric, buttons, thread

my cats

crossing something off my to-do list

anything blooming in my garden

suddenly remembering that the Easter Bunny hid the extra jelly beans in my closet (it’s a good thing I’m typing this and not talking, because my teeth are stuck together right now)

sunshine after days of gloomy weather

There, in about two minutes I came up with more than a dozen small things that would make my day better even if my fairy godmother had sent me off to my perfect life in a magic pumpkin coach. With some more thought and another cup of tea, I could come up with dozens more. And they’re all things I have in my imperfect life right now (except for the jelly beans, which I've eaten).

What are the good small things in your life?

Improg word: Remove

2008-03-27T17:10:00.000-07:00

My improg is appearing later than usual this week due to the many distractions of spring break. One of the less exciting ones—and one of my “Enough procrastination, already!” jobs—ties in with my improg word for this week: remove. I made a trip to the transfer station (a fancy term meaning “the dump”) to remove some things that have been sitting around here for far too long.

On Tuesday morning I loaded up my car with various items too big for the garbage collection and too old or worn out to pass along to someone else, including a used-to-death vacuum cleaner, which was more duct tape than original parts, and three carseats. As I waited in line to get into the hangar-like shed that houses the huge pile of garbage, I found myself looking at a smaller pile outside. I was surprised to see a lot of recyclables in there—things like newspapers that are collected in our curbside program. It would actually take less effort to recycle them than to bring them to the dump, so why were they there?

I pondered this until it was my turn to go into the shed. I was directed to a spot at the base of the garbage pile. I opened the back door of the car and took out the first carseat—and started crying. This seat had been in daily use from the time Child One was 6 months old until Child Two was finally big enough for a booster-style carseat about eight years later. It had been puked on and peed on. The fabric was held together by goldfish cracker residue. The safety standards have been upgraded numerous times since it was made. There was no way it would be considered usable by anyone, but it broke my heart to have to fling it onto this mountain of stinky trash.

I had to do this three times, with tears streaming down my face (and with guys in hard hats pretending not to notice). These seats had travelled thousands and thousands of miles with us, on mundane trips to the grocery store, on vacations, to my dad’s funeral, on first days of school, when we moved to California, and when we moved back to BC.

But it wasn’t sentimentality making me cry. I knew the seats had passed their best-before dates. Removing them from my home wasn’t really the problem. It was the fact that they were being tossed onto this horrible monument of consumer waste that was breaking my heart.

The plastic in those seats (and in the vacuum cleaner) is, in an ideal world, probably recyclable. The metal certainly is. Even the fabric could probably be chipped up and made into a park bench or something. But instead, it will all probably be trucked hundreds of kilometres away to an enormous landfill in the interior of the province, where it will spend eternity.

My husband and I have tried to live an environmentally conscious life since long before it became cool to be green. Before we had kids, we produced one small plastic shopping bag of garbage a week. We saved our food scraps in ice cream tubs and brought them to a friend’s house (some friends bring wine; we brought banana peels). I regularly got into arguments with shop clerks when I asked for no bag. We recycled everything we could, even if that meant bringing stacks of used paper on the bus to put in our university’s recycling bins.

Even now, with two kids, we fill up only one green garbage bag in a typical week. We think about these issues more and produce much less garbage than a lot of people we know. But we are nowhere close to perfect. We buy too much. We buy things that are overpackaged. We waste food. We get lazy and throw things away instead of fixing them. We buy new when we could buy second-hand. We buy more and more even though we already have more than enough.

The environment is a hot topic at my kids’ school right now, so we've been thinking about our family's impact a lot lately. But this trip to the dump was like a visual smack in the face for me (if that makes any sense). It hit me just how much stuff we bring into our home only to remove it. And how our family’s contribution, although smaller than many others’, is just as much a part of the problems our earth is facing. I might have felt just a bit smug before, putting our small garbage can out on pick-up day. But actually seeing where that garbage goes and how one small can added to another soon produces a smelly Mt. Everest—and having to throw my babies’ carseats onto that mess—stopped me in my tracks.

Although the sadness stuck around me all day (as did the smell in my car), my adventure at the transfer station was just the kick in the butt I needed to reevaluate what we bring into our home and how we remove it.

Wordless Wednesday #5: Flying High

2008-03-26T08:17:00.001-07:00

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

Wordless Wednesday #4

2008-03-18T23:54:00.000-07:00

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

Improg word: Stapler

2008-03-18T22:38:00.001-07:00

Did Hayley send me stapler because she knows about my love of office supplies (a love, by the way, that she shares) or because she was stuck for words and looked around her office for inspiration?

I own three staplers: a tiny one that lives in the kitchen junk drawer for those need-a-staple-in-a-hurry jobs, a run-of-the-mill one that we’ve owned forever, and a be-careful-or-it’ll-take-your-thumb-off one that I bought a couple of years ago for work, when I got fed up cutting my fingers on the not-quite-closed staples that were my poor old stapler's best effort on 50-page documents.

So I can justify the three staplers. But what about the fact that I own so many notebooks that I’m scared to count them? And can I rationalize the mountain of Post-it notes (especially the heart-shaped ones)? The rainbow of Sharpies? Do I need half a dozen tape dispensers?

The volume of office supplies in my house is not entirely my fault. My mother is also a sucker for anything that’s both cute and functional, but she positively hates clutter, so she gets her fix by buying stuff and then passing it on to me. Then, at the end of every school year, my kids each haul home a pile of school supplies that are too good to throw out but too used to last through another school year. And Hayley, that paper-clip and sealing-wax pusher, sends me stuff, too.

But, no matter how hard I try in this blog to blame things on other people, I always come back to myself. Office supply stores are like candy stores to me, except I don’t eat paper products anymore (I say “anymore” because I did regularly eat my straw wrappers at snack time in kindergarten. I guess the graham crackers and milk weren’t quite enough. I do wonder whether there’s any relationship between my eating dioxin-laden paper and the fact that I flunked kindergarten).

It’s not just office supplies. It’s books, yarn, fabric, craft supplies, note cards, and magazines, too. I have enough dental floss to make a macrame plant hanger. But I don’t buy these things for the sheer pleasure of spending money. If that’s what I were looking for, I’d spend the money on a plane ticket to Hawaii.

No, I’m a squirrel. I call it my “just in case” hoarding. The things I’ve piled around me are all items I use on a regular basis (although nowhere close to the rate at which I’ve acquired them). When I feel insecure, I buy them as a hedge against future misfortune, just in case. It’s as if I’m thinking, “Well, I may lose everything and not be able to buy food, but I’ll have something good to read. Plus I’ll be able to send Hayley a plea for help on a funky card.”

I’ve figured out just why I do this, although the reasons are too long to go into here. I’ve also realized that Post-it notes are not going to keep my family safe from impending doom and that this stuff was costing me more in money, time, space, and the stress associated with having too much than it was worth in feelings of security. So I’ve stopped buying things just in case. As with the take-your-thumb-off stapler, I have to be able to convince myself that I need this in my life as it is now, not that I maybe just might need it three years from now.

(Hayley, if you’re reading this, send colored paper clips. Quick!)

A realization and the diorama revealed

2008-03-13T10:11:00.000-07:00

A realization
Yesterday one of Child One’s choirs did a concert at a retirement home. This was the first time he had to wear a proper white dress shirt. In the afternoon, as I was ironing (shocking, I know) his shirt, I was hit with a realization. The shirt is big—almost man-sized. While Child One has inherited the scrawny genes from both sides of the family and is not a particularly tall kid, this shirt is closer in size to his father’s shirts than it is to the stripy little-boy ones he used to wear (oh, how I loved those stripy little-boy shirts).

I drove Child One and his friend to the retirement home and stood with them as they put on their vests and ties. This was also the first time that he’s worn a suit-type vest and a tie. As he stood there, dressed up and with his hair slicked to the side, I got a glimpse of what he might look like as a grown-up. And when my husband went to pick them up, at first he didn’t recognize his own son.

Of course, I’ve watched him grow over the years, from a little-bit-premature baby to the almost-teenager he is now. He’s measured his growth against me, his head reaching my hips and then my stomach and then my “pointy bits” (as he called them then) and now passing my shoulders. But until yesterday it didn’t occur to me that he is much closer to his future adulthood than he is to his past toddlerhood.

My guy is growing up.

The diorama revealed
And now, due to popular demand (well, Margerie), here’s a picture of Child Two’s diorama of Inuit life in the summer, taken yesterday. I’m happy to say that almost a week after it was brought to school, everyone’s body parts are still attached.

Here you can see (clockwise from the left)

one guy (who lost his legs twice during construction) sleeping in the tent (which underwent a major collapse at one point),
one man (who lost his head) training a dog (who kept all his body parts the entire time),
two children (one of whom lost her head and the other of whom lost an arm and a foot) playing with a sealskin ball,
the famous hunter (who not only lost an arm and a whole leg, but whose foot broke in two) getting ready to aim his bow and arrow at a bird, and
one man (who lost an arm twice and his head once) fishing using a traditional rock weir and pronged fishing stick (looking at it now, I wonder if he’s meant to be standing right in the river).

Sadly out of the picture is a woman (who lost her head) picking berries. To give you some idea of scale, the box is the kind that copy paper comes in.

Materials used include various types of fabric (cotton, burlap, fake fur, and felt), salt dough, paint, twigs, rocks, embroidery floss, thread, yarn, cardboard, brown paper, wrapping paper, cellophane, moss, wooden sticks, toothpicks, and copious amounts of three kinds of glue.

It’s not as slick as some, but the teacher’s comment as soon as she saw it was, “Oh, that is so Child Two. I can see all the thought she put into it” (although, of course, the teacher doesn’t call her Child Two). My favorite parts are the wildflowers (tiny flowers cut out of fabric glued onto colored stick stems) and the river, which is made of two layers—blue shiny paper on the bottom and blue cellophane on top—so that it looks like the fish are underwater and the river gets shallower on the edge. I also love the fact that Child Two, always one to appreciate diversity, has given some of her pre-contact Inuit people blue and green eyes.

Wordless Wednesday #3

2008-03-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

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

Improg word: Yodel

2008-03-10T20:16:00.000-07:00

Hayley was incredulous last week that she had to write about duck. Well, tell me which is worse, duck or yodel? After we agreed to send each other a list of 30 words, I bet she got stuck at number 28 or 29 and then decided to make herself laugh by sending me the most impossible words to blog about.

I could make this a very short post:

I can’t yodel.

But I’m a wordy person, so I’m guessing I’ll have more to say than that.

I can’t yodel. I can’t sing either. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. Or sing to save my life. Or any other cliché involving singing.

I have the great luck to live with three very musical people. My kids have inherited a natural talent from their father, who can ignore his guitar for weeks, pick it up again, and play better than he did before (sickening, isn’t it?). Child One participates in two choirs and two bands and plays guitar, bass, clarinet, and some piano. His weekly repertoire ranges from very, very formal choral music to Led Zeppelin. Child Two sings in a choir, plays piano, and plans to add flute next year.

And then there’s me. I can’t sing, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sing. I sing a lot. I sang to my kids so much when they were little that they’d ask me to stop. When Child Two learned some music vocabulary, she informed me that I sing off-key. At least I sing better than the cats, two of whom yodel regularly, usually in the middle of the night.

I don’t sing in public much, though, unless I've been drinking, which I don't do much either. I still haven’t recovered from the horrific Christmas concert of 1976. I was supposed to sing a duet of "O Holy Night"—in French—with Peter Whathisname, but Peter decided at the last minute to just mouth the words. There I was, 12 years old and trying to reach those high, high notes, in French, all alone, in front of what seemed like a huge audience, with Peter Stupid Whathisname standing silently beside me. I prefer not to do my singing on stage anymore.

In the past, I would have said that I can’t play an instrument either, but the way I think about it now, I don’t know if I can play an instrument because I’ve never really tried.

Oh, there was my very brief clarinet period in elementary school, followed by my even briefer French horn period (was it the French horn? I don’t even know for sure. All I can say is that it was a real pain to carry). My excuse for quitting clarinet was that I couldn’t play it anymore when I got braces. But when Child One got an even bigger set of orthodontic devices, his clarinet playing got better, so maybe the truth was that I just sucked at it.

What I really wanted to play was the flute. The popular girls—the ones with perfect teeth—played the flute. Oh, how I envied them as they carried their graceful little cases while I lugged my whatever-that-instrument-was to school. Alas, we didn’t have money to rent an instrument so my choices were limited to what the school could lend me. But I didn’t want to take band anyway. The only good I saw in it was that my stepsister, who was learning the violin, and I could clear out the entire house in minutes merely by playing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” together.

These days, trying the piano is on The List of things I’d like to do. I have a book, I have two kids who can help me—now I just need to make the time. I figure that once I’ve given it a good try, I’ll be able to say whether or not I can play an instrument.

What I can do is make up ditties, usually about the kids or the cats. We had a whole series of songs about our last cat sung to the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot.” In progress is one about Jamie sung to “O Canada”—it’s especially popular because it includes the always-funny word fart (does that count as sacrilegious, do you think?). I inherited this skill from my father, who penned the ever-popular “Brother Michael/Sister Suzy” pair of songs (there must be a word for a pair of songs. See how little I know?).

Maybe I can’t sing well, but my life—and, every evening, our house—is full of music. How lucky am I?

Diorama update

2008-03-07T11:38:00.000-08:00

The diorama made it to school this morning. It was touch and go for a while. Yesterday evening saw a last-minute housing crisis when the twig frame for the main tent collapsed, but with two pairs of hands, lashings made of sewing thread, and copious amounts of hot glue, it was repaired. Fortunately the tent was not actually in the diorama box at the time, so the dough guy already glued to his sleeping mat was uninjured.

The hunter, however, looked like he might permanently lose a leg. Not only did it fall off at the hip, but his foot broke in half. Child Two told me that the Inuit did sometimes lose fingers to frostbite. Maybe she could make up a story about how this guy managed to lose a whole leg but still lived? Or maybe he shot himself in the foot with his bow and arrow? The bow is a nasty one, after all, bigger than he is (models may not be true to scale). Lucky for him, despite living in the Arctic in pre-contact times, he was airlifted to Dough Guy Hospital, where Dr. Mom barely saved his foot and leg with white glue.

Finally, after many shouts of “Watch out for the box!” and “Stop picking up the people—their arms will fall off!” and “Get that cat out of here!” we got everyone glued down into their spots with no body parts left over. We did a partial clean-up of the sewing room, which today is still strewn with twigs and bits of moss, paper, and string; discovered a whole trail of brown paw prints along the windowsill and evidence of bright yellow paint still on one of Jamie’s paws (he must have made three separate trips through the paint, getting a different color each time); shooed all the cats out of the room; and carefully closed the door.

In the night, I dreamt of little arms and legs and heads coming unglued, but this morning all was well. I carefully carried the box across the playground, while Child One and Child Two acted as bodyguards, warding off jump ropes, soccer balls, and children on scooters. Worried that someone would lose a head if I jostled the box too much, I used my best belly dancing techniques for moving my bottom half while keeping my top half still. Abs tight, knees loose.

We made it into the classroom unscathed and carefully placed the box on the windowsill with the others. Some of them are amazing. In a few, the Inuit wear little sewn fur outfits (I heard a rumor that one mom got her neighbor to sew the clothes). Some have faces painted by hands much steadier than a 4th-grader might have. One even has twinkling battery-powered lights as stars. Child Two’s looks very much like it was made by a 10 year old, but her teacher thought it was great.

And amazingly, apart from some fake fur for the tent, Child Two made it entirely with materials we had at home. Does that say something impressive about her ingenuity or something scary about how much we have crammed into that sewing room?

The 4th-grade diorama

2008-03-06T14:16:00.000-08:00

Is there any homework assignment that fills a mother’s heart with dread more than a diorama?

Child Two’s 4th-grade class is currently learning about the Inuit and each child has to create a diorama—a three-dimensional scene in a box—showing how they lived. They’ve been given a pages-long set of criteria to follow and three weeks to get it done. And parents are welcome to help. Oh, joy.

Some parents have taken the invitation to help to amazing levels, referring to the project as “mine” instead of “my kid’s.” My husband and I, who are both ridiculously overeducated, have always vowed that we won't push our kids to be perfect students. We’ve watched a good friend deal with the fallout of his mathematician father’s harsh expectations, and we know people who make their children play soccer year after year because they—the parents—love it, even though their kids hate running around in the rain kicking a ball. We want our kids to feel that they’re free to follow their own paths even if they’re different from ours.

And I don’t want my kids to be plagued with the perfectionism that sometimes makes me lose all sense of reasonableness. While we encourage them to do their best, we tell them that the learning is more important than the grades and that doing your best doesn’t mean being perfect.

We certainly help our kids when they ask for it, and sometimes when they don’t but we know they really need it. But we do not do their work for them, ever, and if they’re determined not to take our advice, we let them do it their way, even though we know we’re right (of course).

Child Two brought her box home a couple of weeks ago and put it in her bedroom, where it sat and sat. When she decided it was time to get to work, she first made a plan, but she was so overwhelmed with it all that she worked at a snail’s pace. Painting her mountains—something that would normally take her half an hour—took days, interrupted by frequent breaks to play with the cats.

As the deadline loomed, she started asking for help. There were some things that she just doesn’t have the skills to do alone and others that involved sharp implements and the hot glue gun. For the last several days, that diorama has demanded more attention than a cranky two year old.

Disregarding my suggestion to use toothpicks to hold together her salt-dough people, she’s had recurring trouble with body parts falling off—one poor guy has had his legs glued on at least three times. This morning, a mere 24 hours before the due date and too late to make new people, she discovered a horrifying scene of heads, legs, and arms on her work table. The dough is not dry enough and now that they've been glued, it's too late to put the figures in the oven. As I write, they lay on a baking tray over the oven vent with the oven on low. When I make a cup of tea, which I do whenever I encounter a really difficult sentence or a particularly boring passage or I’m overwhelmed with my workload (see where Child Two gets this habit?), I blow-dry the little bodyless heads and headless bodies while I wait for the kettle.

Assuming she can get her people to stop spontaneously decomposing, she’s almost done. The goal is to keep everything in one piece until the teacher has seen it. If all those little people want to lose their heads (and arms) after that, that’s okay.

Child Two, who had already learned about the Inuit way of life in class, learned some more lasting lessons during this assignment:

1. If you leave a cup of brush-cleaning water on your work table, a cat will knock it over into your scrapbooking box.
2. If you leave plates with wet paint unattended, you will end up with yellow paw prints on the carpet, blue ones on your chair, and brown ones in your textbook.
3. Acrylic paint can’t be removed from a textbook once it’s dry.
4. To be on the safe side, just go ahead and close the door whenever you leave the room.
5. It’s better to start right away and finish early than to start late and be stressed out.
6. Sometimes you have to scale back on your plans.
7. Even though it’s stressful, making a diorama is still more fun than spelling drills.
8. Your mother knows a thing or two. Listen to her advice.

And I (re)learned something. Some of the traits that drive me nuts in my kids they’ve learned by example—from me. As I talk to Child Two about time management and perfectionism, I realize that I’m talking to myself too.

Now it’s time to make a cup of tea and blow-dry some body parts.

Wordless Wednesday #2

2008-03-05T12:38:00.000-08:00

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

The dreaded grocery shopping

2008-03-04T11:09:00.000-08:00

Every week I head out on an adventure of mammoth proportions: the dreaded grocery shopping.

My problems start with the grocery cart. For those who don’t live here, I’ll explain our system. The carts are chained together in long lines. To release one, you put a quarter (or, at some stores, a loonie—that’s a dollar in this crazy country) in a slot on the lockbox mounted on the cart. When you’re finished with the cart, you chain it back into line and your quarter (or loonie) pops out. The good thing about this system is that our parking lots are not full of left-behind carts taking up the last parking space or waiting to scratch your car’s paint in a big wind. The problem arises when someone has raided the stash of quarters and loonies that you keep in your car so that he or she can buy a double chocolate dip donut at Tim Horton’s. On these days you have to go into the store and stand in line at the customer service desk to get change, and then go back out into the parking lot. Since this is Vancouver, on an average of 154.5 days a year you are doing this in the rain.

Clutching my quarter (or my loonie), I approach the cart garage (I’m sure that must be the technical term). Despite the fact that dozens of carts are parked there, the only ones on the ends of the lines are those containing dirty tissues or the remains of someone else’s free food sampling. Wrinkling my nose, I choose the least offensive cart, transfer the garbage to another one, and head to the store.

At this point, the cart seems fine. But as I get closer to the store, it starts to squeak or pull to the left or a wheel starts shuddering, or, if it’s really my day, all three. I decide it’s not bad enough to trudge back to the cart garage in the rain, but as my shopping progresses and the cart gets fuller, it gets louder and wobblier and impossible to steer. By now, I can’t trade carts without a major production, so I put up with it, pretending that the noise isn’t making people look at me with pity (or is that annoyance?) and trying not to crash into anyone. You know that cart you can hear squeaking three aisles over during your whole shopping trip? That’s me. And you know that woman who has to lift up the back wheels of the cart to get it to turn right? That’s me, too.

There are at least eight grocery stores in my town and I’m not loyal to any one of them. I choose one based on which is closest to other places I need to go to or, because not one of them carries everything we use, based on which best fits that week’s shopping list. This means that I have the layouts of at least eight stores taking up precious room in my brain and sometimes I get them mixed up. I comfort myself with the thought that all my backtracking is a good source of exercise.

And sometimes they change the layout of the store, causing mayhem. The biggest store I regularly shop in did this recently. For weeks, products were shuffled into temporary spots that made no sense. The potato chips were in the frozen food aisle one week and with the light bulbs the next. The soup was first with the pop and then with the paper towels. Customers wandered around in a daze. I’d never seen such confused looking people, even in the middle of a calculus final. For those weeks, I shopped by accident, buying whatever I happened to come across. I wondered if the managers were watching us through their surveillance windows, laughing as we tried to find the Cheerios.

Once I have my groceries, it’s time to pay for them. No matter how carefully I choose a check-out—looking for the shortest line or one with a bagger in addition to the cashier and avoiding the one with the trainee cashier or with a customer buying a whole cart of produce (“Hey, Sylvia! What’s the code for rutabaga?”)—it seems that as soon as I park my cart in a line-up, it slows to the rate of the proverbial molasses in January. As a public service, I should wear a sign on my back that says, “Don’t stand in this line. You will grow old waiting.” On the bright side, it gives me time to flip through the magazines and determine that, despite the claims on their covers, they do not contain the ten tips that will give me a smaller butt or the secrets to finally organizing my house forever.

I avoid the store that makes you bag your own groceries. First, they also charge for bags and more likely than not I’ve left my stack of nicely folded cloth bags in the car. And second, despite the fact that I’m a competent and intelligent woman who has packed for a family of four innumerable times, who has packed for I-don’t-know-how-many house moves, who packs lunches every single weekday, I get complete performance anxiety when it comes to packing my own groceries when there’s a line-up of people behind me.

Having finally paid, with a few more gray hairs gracing my head, I push/tug/crash the cart outside and try to remember where I’ve parked the car (eight different stores means eight different crowded parking lots). If I’m desperate, I walk around pushing the trunk button on my key fob until my trunk pops open. Then I realize that I’ve left the soccer box (a big Rubbermaid bin full of all the things that I, as the team manager, am required to have at practices and games: first aid supplies, extra water bottles, tissues, emergency contact information for all the players, etc.) in the trunk again and there’s not enough room for the groceries. I pile them into the remaining space and into the back seat of the car and turn my now miraculously silent and well-behaved cart toward the cart garage.

If you see me in the parking lot, don’t offer to trade me your quarter (or loonie) for my cart. Really, believe me when I tell you that you’re better off choosing your own.

Improg word: Bop? Or is it?

2008-03-03T10:43:00.000-08:00

When Hayley made her list of improg words to send me, she typed them in different colors and fancy fonts, unlike me, who scrawled them by hand (although I did send them in a handmade envelope). Today I reached into her envelope and first found another little friendship note disguised as a word slip (Hayley, how do you manage to make me pull those out on the days I need them most? You’re kind of scary). Then I pulled out a word written in a very curvy font: bop.

With much loud sighing, I started to think about bop. Let’s see—I take belly dancing lessons, but while belly dancing is curvy and swervy, like the font this word was written in, it’s not really boppy. I recently started taking a salsa fitness class. I bet I could get something bop-related out of that.

As I stared at the word, I realized that the b had a very curvy top, even for a font like this. I turned the slip over and discovered that my word for the week is not bop. It’s dog. And I am a twit.

I’ve already told one of my best dog stories, so I’ll write about Sam, my childhood dog. We got Sam when I was 7 or 8 years old (I flunked kindergarten, so my ages and grades didn't line up for a few years. I know we got Sam when I was either 7 or in second grade (which is the same year for most people but wasn't for me)). My brother and I had been begging our dad for a dog for months. He kept saying that he’d trade me in for a dog and a dollar if he found a place that would take me.

One day he drove past the pound and saw Sam in the window. I don’t know what made him stop and go in, but he did. They told him that Sam was slated to be put to sleep if no one adopted him that day (whether or not this is true or was just a desperate sales pitch, I don’t know). Apparently without a second thought (and according to my mother, without consulting her), my dad bought Sam for the whopping sum of $8.00.

I usually came home from school to an empty house because my mom worked. But Sam came into our lives during the one short period when she wasn’t working, so my dad brought him straight home. I came home from school that day to be greeted by 17 pounds of black curls, a pink tongue, and a wagging tail. My second thought (my first was a joyful “Doooggg!”) was a stomach sinker. My dad had traded me in.

According to him, the pound was willing to trade the dog for me but wasn’t willing to give him the dollar too, so Sam and I both got to stay. Thank goodness, because that dog was the best part of my childhood. He was a joy and my rock during some very hard times. I don’t think I let go of him at all on the day my dad moved out. When my brother moved to my dad’s two years later, I locked myself in the bathroom, unable to say goodbye, and Sam became even more important to me. When, less than a year after that, my mom sold our house and Sam had to move to my dad’s, I packed him a little suitcase and again locked myself in the bathroom, unable to say goodbye.

For the next two years I saw Sam every second weekend when I went to my dad’s and once in a while when my brother brought him to my mom’s apartment for a visit. Then my mom decided to move to Vancouver and I had to go with her. In the previous five years I had gone from a 9 year old living with two parents, a brother, and a dog in a house in the suburbs to a 14 year old living with just her mom in a tiny apartment in a different country, 1000 miles away from her dad, her brother, her family and friends, and her dog. Saying goodbye to my friends and the only town I remembered living in was hard. Saying goodbye to my family was harder. But saying goodbye to Sam was the hardest of all. I was so scared that he would forget me.

But I didn’t need to worry. I lived at my dad’s for two months during the summers and visited every second Christmas break, and each time we pulled into the driveway from the airport, Sam raced out of the house, crashing into me full force, knowing just who I was. And when I’d gone back home, he tore apart my bed, looking for me.

Sam—that little bundle of energy whom we supposedly rescued from imminent death—lived a good long life. I was 24 when my dad called to tell me that he’d died and I sobbed like the little girl I was when we got him. Here I sit, 36 years after I first set eyes on him, living now in a house full of cats, and the thought of losing him still makes me cry.

But I don’t want to think of him with sadness, so instead I’ll remember his snore (which rivaled my dad’s) as he slept on my bed, the way he could pull me down the street even though he weighed only 17 pounds, how funny he looked when we gave him a bath, how he would steal my underwear out of the dryer and bury it in the backyard, how he would hide under the bed when he got an embarrassing haircut. I might dig out his old license tags, which my dad sent to me every year. And I’ll thank whatever it was that made my dad go into the pound that day.

This picture is tacked above my desk in my office. I know I have better ones of Sam, but finding one would involve looking in the Photo Cupboard of Doom and would take all day, so this one will have to do.

Enough, already!

2008-03-02T20:01:00.000-08:00

The other day a thought—I can’t remember just what it was—went through my head for the gazillionth time and I said to myself, “Enough, already!”

English is a foreign language for at least one of my ~~hundreds of~~ ~~dozens of~~ three regular readers, so I’ll explain that this phrase expresses exasperation. When siblings have been endlessly arguing over whose turn it is to clean the litter box, their mother might shout, “Enough, already! That box better be clean before dinner or you’ll both be on litter box duty for the rest of your lives.” When a group of friends has been wandering around the video store for half an hour trying to decide what to rent, one of them might say, “Enough, already! Why don’t we just admit that we all want to see Saturday Night Fever one more time?” (By the way, the latter is not a true-life example. Neither is the former, as Child One can’t go within 10 feet of the litter box scoop without gagging.)

When I said “Enough, already!” to myself, it was a light-bulb moment. My head was filled with all the things I have enough of in my life: stuff (especially certain categories of stuff), clutter, stress, disorganization, disappointment, negative people, procrastination. I could go on, but it’s a bit overwhelming. And I thought of all the things I definitely don’t have enough of: furniture (we left much of ours behind during our last big move and haven’t replaced it yet), organization, fun, time spent doing what I love to do, and so on. I kept trying to add yarn to that list, but I knew I was lying.

Like the mother who just wants the litter box cleaned, I’m exasperated with many aspects of my life right now. When I think about it, the whole idea of my Getting My Shit Together Project (started in September) and its subproject, the Year of Living Differently, was borne out of frustration with the status quo. I’m saying “Enough, already! Make your life what you want it to be.”

Because I’ve realized that any life improvement project is easier for me when I give it a catchy title (probably because I’m more likely to actually remember I’ve embarked on a life improvement project instead of making a great plan and promptly forgetting it), I’m going to try something new for March. I’m saying “Enough, already!” to procrastination for the month.

I chose procrastination for a few reasons. First, my procrastination habit has gotten worse over the years, growing from almost nonexistent to a major force, and I’m worried that at this rate, by the time I’m in my 60s I’ll be putting off basic things like eating and getting out of bed in the morning.

Second, procrastination takes a lot of time. There’s the time I spend listening to the infinite-loop to-do list in my head, the time I waste when I’m avoiding doing something I don’t want to do, and the time it takes to remember how to finish something I started weeks ago or to find the things I need to finish it.

Third, procrastination is a big source of stress in my life. Every time I see something I’ve been meaning to take care of or something has to get done in a rush at the last minute or something is forgotten altogether because I’ve put it off, I mentally hit myself in the head and call myself names.

On most mornings in the last couple of weeks I’ve spent half an hour on neglected paperwork before starting work. When I do something that I’ve been procrastinating about, it no longer plays on the to-do list several times a day. I no longer tense up when I think about it, because I don’t think about it anymore. It’s done and it’s gone from my mind!

So I’ve made a list of five things I’ve been putting off that I will take care of this month. Some are bigger and some are smaller, but they’re all things that have been hanging over my head for weeks or months or (I hate to say it) years. I could have listed dozens, but these are the first five that came to mind. When I get them done, I will pick five more. I’m also going to try to recognize when I’m procrastinating about everyday things.

If this works well for me (that is, if, at the end of the month, I don’t stumble across this post and say, “Oops. I forgot I’d planned that”), then I’ll pick another theme for April. My hope is that by declaring “Enough, already!” about the stuff and emotions and habits cluttering up my life, I’ll be making room for the more positive things that I don’t have enough of.