Random Meanderings at Middle Age

Random on a Wednesday

1. Well, let me start by saying that Random was my favorite of the princes in Amber.  I now realize that I need to reread the series this summer, I think there's an omnibus edition available.  In fact, I may hunt for the first book and start today.
2. I decided the kids and I needed to enjoy the sunshine and lovely weather and we headed off strawberry picking!  Oh was it heavenly, the fields smelled intensely of the fruit and by walking to the farthest section we were able to pick 8lbs in less than an hour.  I plan to freeze some for future smoothies, make strawberry butter (w/ cardamon and other spices) and if I can find a n easy jam recipe that isn't too full of sugar I'd like to make some as well.  Oh and muffins.  Needless to say the one or two we allowed ourselves, all warm and sweet in the sun were simply heavenly.
3. In one of her short stories, Elizabeth Berg has a character say something that articulates a feeling I've had for a long time, "All this self-esteem crap was making for a society of selfish people who were careless with everything except themselves". 
4. It's nearly time folks.  Summer approaches and it's time to hang with the family, the sun, the sand and the horseshoe crabs.   It's not that we don't love you all..we just step back for a bit.  I hope you all find time for rest, creativity, love and family this summer.  I'll be checking in now and again. I may even get to blog a finished object or two this week, although I may not.
5. Oh and John?  This whole away in Canada for business thing has gotten old.  You can come home now.  I'll clear the books, magazines, dvds , knitting and kids off your side of the bed! 

Out of the fire and into Purgatory Chasm...

(with apologies to Joyce).

7 Adults and 13 children scampered about Purgatory Chasm this morning and had quite a good time of it.  The thing about this short hike however is it's the remains of a glacial ice dam breaking about 15K years ago and so is essentially many huge rocks, boulders, ledges, caves and the like.  There is much potential for harm and indeed people do get foolish and get hurt here every year.  However, we were not one of them.  The kids especially enjoyed squeezing through something called "Fat Man's Misery".  The problem (for neurotic me anyway) is that this lets out on a teensy ledge over a 40-50 foot drop.  You will note we had two adults spotting the kids as they exited.  You will see the dramatic moment when Em saved our friend Neil from an untimely demise (I also have a picture with her poised to stomp on his fingers and leave him to his fate!!

Later, we returned to our hosts , joined by more kids and adults and had an amazing cook out: Smoked brisket and chicken, hamburgs,hot dogs, many homemade sides and the like!  Great food and good friends.  The kids went swimming, the adults chatted and we didn't leave anyone behind in a cave! 

So here's the thing, I really enjoyed the chasm, haven't been there since I was a teen and it's really neat to see such intense evidence of the forces of nature...BUT, we went with a large number of children ages 6-13 and a large number of adults.  The children were supervised and spotted when in dangerous places and let's be clear, this place can be dangerous if you're stupid.  We were lucky that the brief rain storm happened 10 minutes after we left, those rocks after a rain would not be safe or fun.  That said, we had a blast and I was thrilled to be able to do this kind of thing without needing more                            

than the occasional hand over a rock.  It really is lovely and the veins of quartz were cool.  It was a great warm up for all t

 

he hiking and biking we'll be doing on the Cape soon!

(as always click on pics to enbiggen)

 

 

Sewing mends the soul.

It's been a little over 3 months since Em's Bat Mitzva and I decided it was time to make her quilt.  At the party I had left out 9 inch squares of muslin for people to sign with fabric pens.  We had 28 blocks made and they are truly wonderful!  They're written in English, Hebrew and even Spanish.  Many people drew pictures or doodled designs and I think it will make a very special quilt-it will also be a very large quilt.  9 inch squares?!  What was I thinking? 

A few years ago I had bought two complimentary fabrics that I thought would make a nice quilt for her.  I had just enough to make another 28 or so squares.  If you click on the pictures you can see that the medium fabric has tiny fans and the dark has small yellow flowers that compliment nicely.  Once I was done I realized I had to lay it all out so that I had an idea of what the finished top would look like.  This meant clearing my king size bed and shuffling pieces around until they seemed right.
I'd like to find a good fabric for a border and something fun for the backing.  It's clear that this will be a king size quilt which makes it likely I will have to send it out for finishing (and that won't be cheap!)  I may be able to do it myself if I keep it very simple, but I want this to be special and something Em will have for always.  However, one step at a time and the next step is ironing all those squares and them sewing them together in strips and then in rows and we'll see where we stand.

So, as you probably gather this means my craft room is nearing completion.  I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner.  Having it next to the master bedroom is wonderful and makes it easy to sneak in at odd moments to work on things.  I took a picture tonight of one wall to give you an idea of how it's coming together.
    I've been thinking alot about the spaces we carve out for ourselves to create in.  Mine needs to have plenty of photographs, family art work and inspiration (I've put up two large bulletin boards and they are already covered with photos,postcards, scraps etc) in the form of ephemera.  In this picture you see some of my fabric storage, rubberstamp drawers, knitting and other supplies.  There are shelves of knitting, quilting and other craft books and it's already a place where I can just enter and start making things. I've even managed to set up my treehouse dollhouse and a robot that I made for Noah has taken up residence on the roof.
    The other day I was up early and  made this years summer journal.  We keep a joint journal in the summer, anyone in the house can write in it, draw etc.  IN the back we list all the books we're reading.  It's a lot of fun and the kids enjoy contributing to it almost every night.
Oh and I even got to make a couple of ATC cards in the process (and worked on a more elaborate quilted ATC for the swap at Creative Mom Podcast, this month's theme is Muse.  I haven't photographed that, but do need to finish it and mail it out by the end of next week.

I hope you all get a little space to be inspired and creative this summer.  I feel much better when I allow myself time to just play with paper or fabric or pens or yarn or almost any medium!

   

Endings,beginnings and in betweens...

Noah graduated from grade school this morning.  In this town that means that he graduated from 4th grade.  We have two middle schools, one for 5/6 and one for 7/8 and off he'll go to 5th grade and a new school next year.  Yeah.  I cried a little.  Floral was such a nurturing place for my kids and now my youngest will be leaving and in all likelihood I won't be there again.  This year was a tough one for Noah but he worked hard and really challenged himself to overcome some obstacles and while I won't say he never complained, he also never gave up!  I am very, very proud of him!

So, this part of our lives is ending and next year my daughter will really be entering the teen years and Noah will be starting in a new, very large and somewhat confusing at first school.  I know they'll both do great and I plan to be involved in the 5th grade as a volunteer next year in order to be able to be connected to Noah as he transitions (I volunteered once a week when Em was in 5th grade and it was fun-it gets harder as they get older though).

    However, I am trying to not think too much about the endings (which make me a little sad), or the beginnings (which can be a little scary) but about the space between them.  Summer is here .  The kids are already talking about their favorite beaches, the books they want to read this summer, the board games, the biking and the hiking.  We're all excited that the osprey we watch every summer have two babies in the nest.  We're an ice cream loving family so they are hoping to show their grandmother all their favorite ice cream stops.  Em and I are looking forward to the new Stephanie Meyers book that will be released midnight on August 1.  We are all looking forward to a slew of fun summer movies.  There will be miniature golf and frisbee and crab hunting.  Mostly, we plan to just be together and not think too much about before or ahead and just be...just for a few weeks and then we'll get back into the groove of work and school and other responsibilities. 
    For a few weeks though, I just want to enjoy my family and not be weakened by my fear of the passage of time.  We're pretty simple as families go and don't go in for the really deep family mottos.  We have two and they both come from  Disney's Lilo and Stitch:

1. This is my family. I found it, all on my own. Is little, and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good.
2. Ohana means family, family means nobody gets left behind. Or forgotten.

Stop!!!!

    Sigh.  I have made an executive decision and declared that this family is to do nothing but rest, drink plenty of fluids and maybe do home related tasks if possible and not too strenuous.  My cold is now a virus with a fever and has left me with almost no voice.  John is still not fully recovered from his stuff and the kids aren't feeling 100% either.  We had some commitments this week end but I know from sad experience that if we don't step back and rest we will all be miserable.  Not that there aren't those who might be amused at the concept of me with no voice (and when I do have a voice it's the voice of Lauren Bacall with more "croak than smoke" in it.).

    Why is it so hard to step back?  The world will not come crashing to a stop if we don't do errands, attend functions, sports, etc.  It doesn't help to see that my neighbors are doing a thorough purge and clean of their garage...it makes me think I should get out of bed and start the same here (I keep putting that task off) and the lawn mower needs to be taken to be repaired and the craft room needs it's organizing finished and...and...and.  But, it stops for 48 hours.  Sleep.  Fluids. Reading.  Maybe a DVD later is about as ambitious as it's gonna get around here.  I honestly think that some of the recurring cold/allergy/virus etc stuff for all of us is a result of not slowing down, so with apologies, we're ducking out and taking a break and that's about that.  So glad I made chicken soup yesterday afternoon!

    Noah had a wonderful Author's Tea at his school Friday morning.  The story he wrote mostly centered on his adventures playing Smash Brother's Brawl on the Wii-or rather an adventure with some of those characters.  Much of his fiction writing this year has been Bionicle based stories so this was not a huge surprise.  There was much drama and many explosions!

    I'm very proud of the hard work he's done this year and I will miss terribly the elementary school that has done such a wonderful job sheparding both my children these past 7 years. I will probably cry at the graduation ceremony Monday morning.  It's funny how you want so much for your kids to grow and become healthy and independent and happy and yet it really hurts to see them grow up (especially the youngest).  I feel like lately this is all I blog about, the whole "they're growing up too fast" spiel.  I think that in addition to the 300 other waiting chores, the garage clean out keeps getting deferred in part because i know we will unearth all sorts of stuff from their younger days (trikes! colored chalk! sprinkler flowers! ) that are now long forgotten.  There's a small one piece wooden desk/chair like some of us remember from school , that I picked up years ago at a  yard sale for Em.  She spent so much time with that outside, she and her little friends were "teachers" or it became a lemonade stand or theater etc.    The thought of slogging through all the layers of their childhood right now seems exhausting and fraught with nostalgia and tears on my part.  On the other hand, the garage really needs to be cleaned out one of these days.
      I don't know.  Is it me?  Am I the only person who gets all teary over this stuff?  Some of my friends think I'm a loon about it all.  I enjoy every moment with the kids and it's not like every minute I'm dreading the next minute passing but this year seems to be a real big one for all these bitter sweet thoughts.
    Enough of all that though...I have some serious sleeping to do.  I'm rereading David Sedaris's Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, a very funny collection of essays I took out again from the library (I am waiting for his latest to come from the library as well).  I started it at 3am when I couldn't breathe sleep..it's oddly comforting in the way that reading about others crazy neuroses make you feel saner about your own.  I suppose I could enjoy some of this lovely weather today and read out back near my little water garden...there's no law that says I have to sleep in the bed.

    Have a wonderful week end and Happy Father's Day to any fathers reading this.

Another trip around the sun..

I had a lovely, purposely low key 47th birthday.  I started the day with some lace knitting and reading (Diana Wynne Jone's latest, House of Many Ways).  The kids headed off to school and I even got some extra sleep in!
Lunch with a friend, a massage, and time to enjoy all the roses my garden has thrown at me this week.   

My mom made a wonderful dinner at her place and the kids gave me fun cards they made and mostly made me laugh.  As always clicking on the pics, enbiggens them and makes it easier to read or see details.
I brought my spinning wheel to my knitting group last night -I should have done this ages ago!  I got so much done and it was very relaxing.  The Lendrum folds and is light and easy to transport.  I want to knit the Morning Surf Scarf that's in the current issue of Spin-Off with singles I am spinning now.

Anyway, I had a nice birthday and will now spend the last hour of it reading.

The sun..it burns.

My it's been a scorcher!  Hot enough for you?  It's not the heat, it's the humidity. Um, you get the picture.  We've entered weather cliche central here in New England.  It's as though we had a brief week or two of Spring, which was lovely, and have now entered into what looks to be a brutal summer. 

I should be composing a long, bittersweet post about my children growing older (I seem to write a version of this post every couple of months), especially since my son will be leaving the local elementary school and heading to the 5/6 grade school that serves the whole town next year.  However, it's been pretty freakin' hot and my husband has been pretty sick and my mom has no AC working at her place. 

So:

Knitting report?  Sigh

Spinning report?  It is to laugh.

Exercise report?  Yeah, right.

Gardening report? I water everything a lot.

Reading report?  I am going through novels at a fast clip.  I just finished Kushiel's Mercy, which was superb.  Jaqueline Carey does an amazing job of keeping me interested in the lush world she has created novel after novel.  I'm just about finished with Susan Wittig Albert's latest China Bayle mystery, Nightshade.

The kids are fine.  I'm fine (if frazzled).  I do still have a birthday tomorrow and while it will be somewhat low key this year (I usually have a cook-out and invite pretty much everyone I know) I'm looking forward to lunch out, a massage and dinner with family. 

However, right now it's time to do battle with the furnace we call New England, water those plants and get to work.  I'm wilting already!
 

I remain incredibly boring.

• Not that it will stop me from blogging however.
• My favorite podcast is actually not knitting related, it's Creative Mom.  I recently joined two of her related swaps, one is a monthly themed ATC swap.  June is my first month entering the theme is Muse.  I am enjoying creating the card (it will be quilted) for this.  Working in such a small (playing card size) format is freeing somehow and I'm trying not to overthink the process.  There is also a Postal Letterbox exchange starting this month and I am very excited about this as well.  The theme is Spring.  I carved a rubber stamp that is primitive but expresses my love of the sun and the light and the fullness of my heart when spring returns, especially to my garden (which is the muse I am honoring in my ATC swap so it's all sort of connected).
• I have given myself permission to be way behind on the Slow-Bee shawl.  Clue 5 was released today and I am 4 rows away from finishing clue 2.  It's all good.  It looks great and there's nothing I can do about losing time to vertigo and the virus.  I have two summer tops I want to finish and two pairs of socks (one of them monkeys) and may just concentrate on those when knitting for the rest of the month.  If I get a block of time that lends itself to lace knitting that's great but I'm going to try and not make myself crazy about it.
• The deck is looking very inviting (the sun and record heat will be back with a veangance this week end and I expect to spend much quality time out there).  The boxes are planted, the water garden is restocked and the screen house next to it will bring respite from bugs when they appear.
• I've rediscovered the library after going a little crazy at the book shops and Kindle lately.  If you look at my reading shelf on the left you'll see I remain ecectic in my reading habits although one could argue that Maps and Legends, Proust and the Squid and Minders of Make-Believe all deal with reading and literacy to one degree or another. 
• So, with all that my plan for the rest of this (my birthday) month is to read, knit, garden and spin. Oh and also, bike and walk, ideally with John and the kids.

Feeling better, gardening, friends, family and spring.

• The past 10 days or so of being unwell really took more of a toll than I thought.  For those who might not know I had a bad case of vertigo, combined with some kind of virus and it all added up to a perfect storm of cycling vertigo/virus stuff/vertigo/virus stuff etc.  Nothing helped much and the meds for the severe bouts of vertigo, while they helped me sleep they made it impossible for me to do much else.  In the brief  hours of "ok" I would have I'd do things, so I had a great bike ride a week ago with a friend and her family joined us for dinner that night and there was a lovely Shabbat dinner with friends and family around the same time.  I was able to work (my hours are somewhat reduced this time of year anyway).  So, I don't want folks thinking it was all doom and gloom, but it really was not fun and more importantly it sucked the ability to cope right out of me.  This made me more irritable than usual, which really annoyed me, which made me even more irritable and so on.  Anyway, I think it's finally going away.  I really hope so.  My plan is to pretend that's the case in any event.
• Saturday morning I woke up early and my little wagon and I were second in line for Tower Hill's annual plant sale.  There was no need for me to be second in line, my budget was minuscule, my needs were simple bu t I wanted to enjoy the gardens early in the morning and enjoy the sale before I got tired or sick.  There were some quick thunderstorm bursts which were actually somewhat pleasant and I bought two black tomato plants (if all goes well later this summer I cna put out a dish of red,yellow and black cherry tomatoes!), a pink tansy and two really ugly cactus.  In the pics scattered about this entry you see a grown up version that lives at Tower Hill.  They look like petrified knobs of wood and get bumpy and scaly and occasional shoot out a stem with a leaf and even less occasionally a flower.  I love succulents and cactus (although I don't have many anymore) and the uglier or weirder the better. I also got (only $5!) a hypertufa green man for my garden!
• My grandiose plan to turn the craft-room-formerly-known-as-the-dining-room into simply THE OFFICE and the office (a small room upstairs next to the master bedroom) into THE CRAFT ROOM have finally become 80% reality.  I need to bring up the rest of my craft materials and we need to divest ourselves of some more junk and recycling but the bulk of the work (Thanks John!) has been done and we may actually end up with a pleasant and organized space where John or the kids can be on the desktop, or at the table with a laptop (in Em's case) and homework.  There will eventually be a leather couch (Thanks Uncle Denny)for curling up and reading and plenty of bookshelves and books (even after culling).  The craft room will be organized and I will be able to access what I need with out rummaging through chaos.  If I have to spend an hour finding and making space for materials for a project than I lose steam pretty early on (or run out of time).  I'll post pics of the craft room later this week.
• Knitting has been at a glacial pace (it triggers the vertigo, although I successfully worked on my cardigan last night) and I am two clues behind in my lace project.  Hope springs eternal.  Spinning of course was right out.
• Reading I've done but mostly lighter fare that can easily be put aside.  I did read and enjoy Charles de Lint's Dingo, another (though short) of his urban fantasies.  I'm currently reading the 16th outing of our favorite vampire hunter Anita Blake, Blood Noir.
• So, that's about it.  I chose the title I did mostly to emphasis the whole feeling better thing of course, but to express gratitude that I have still been able to experience family and friends and the excitement of spring despite feeling blechy.

Beauty.

We've entered that charming time of year when my garden becomes somewhat garish and over the top in her need to display her..um..charms.