Mr. Entomology

Twenty eight years ago, with a little help from Jeff and a good midwife, I gave birth.
To this boy.

He's a little bit (!) nerdy and weird, but we love him to pieces.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JON!

Readiness and Rabblerousers

Jeff is our town's co-ordinator for ResistNet, one of the sponsoring groups for the September 12th rally in Washington DC. We had our first meeting of the minds last night in our living room. I decided to make cookies. Oatmeal chocolate chip sounded mildly healthy.
When I pulled my chocolate chip jar out of the pantry, it occurred to me how ridiculous my food storage priorities have become.

To give you an idea of the scale of that great big jar:

Before everyone went home, I took a picture, a la neo-neocon. Just to make sure that the nameless remain so.

If you are interested in preparedness-type topics, I recommend that you check out the Preparedness Pro blog that is new to my blog roll. This woman is the Queen of All Things Related to Preparedness. I am very excited because she is coming to our area to present her classes in February. Look for related future posts.

This kakapo is maybe a bit too tame...

A little hilarity on the weekend never hurt anyone.
Did it?

"The time has come," the walrus said...

..."to speak of many things;
of ships and shoes and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings."
And today, that behemoth of controversy, global warming.
Now, you all know that I love this earth and I try to live as lightly upon its beautiful surface as I can. I think it behooves all of us to produce as little waste as we can and to live efficiently. But I have to say, and I hope none of my lovely readers will be offended, that this global warming crap is making me grumpy.
Jeff is a statistician. He has spent many hours poring over his computer, entering climate data into charts. He understands, as does any statistician worth his scatter plot, that numbers can be skewed in infinite ways to "prove" the story you choose to tell. Growing numbers of scientists are speaking out on the subject of climate change, not denying that it exists but showing scientifically that is not new and corresponds more to solar events than to anything man-made. Not that I want to downplay the effects of our behavior on the larger picture.
But....
I have a couple of websites that I want you to look at.
Icecap.us and CO2Science are two very sensible (no hysteria) and informative sites that are chock full of fascinating material.


Icecap has some great satellite photos of the UK, which is currently in the grip of an unprecedented cold snap. The whole country is white. It also has an FAQ and Myths' page which is well worth the read. The videos above are representative of those found on CO2.
I personally will be spending too much time on these websites in the next few days.
Meanwhile, I will still be recycling and conserving as if my life depended on it.
I suggest you do both of the same.

Silver and Gold

Make new friends and keep the old,
One is silver and the other's gold.

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.

I have a friend. My oldest friend, in that she has been my friend longer than anyone else on earth, apart from my Mum and my sister.

This is my friend Janet.

This is me.

I have been working on this post in my head for a long time. I wanted to tell you about Janet. About how remarkable it is that, although we have only seen each other once in the last 42 years, we still call each other "friend."

But especially, about how remarkable I think she is as a person.

I have mentioned a couple of times that as a girl I really only wanted two things: to be a ballerina and to own a horse. I didn't get either, although Annie managed to "kind of" fulfill both aspirations. My friend Janet was an avid horse rider when she was young and I was ever-so-slightly jealous. We were pretty good friends at school, but didn't spend any time at each other's homes because we lived in different villages. We attended a little village school in Middle Littleton, which was where Janet lived. My family lived in North Littleton. There was also a South Littleton. You get the idea! I could spend pages telling you about that school and my teachers, but maybe some other time. This post is about my friend.

Janet used to call me occasionally from the phone box by her house. We got a phone, with the number Badsey 733, which I had to recite when I answered the phone because my Dad had his own plumbing business. It was an exciting event when Janet called me. No one else ever did, you see. Call me, I mean. I was sad to leave Janet when we moved to New Zealand, but we promised to write. I was eleven at the time. And write we did. For some reason, we started this thing where each time we wrote, we would beat the last letter's page total. I think we were up to over 30 pages by the time we got to be into our teens and, I assume, too busy for such time-consuming pastimes.

The years passed by and pretty soon we were all grown up. Jan went to university and graduated and got married. I notably DIDN'T go to university (sore point with my parents), although I did some traveling and served a mission and then got married shortly after Jan and Steve. We didn't see each other again until we were in our mid 30's. My sister and I had planned a trip to England with our daughters. Anne wasn't able to go in the end, so Bethany and I went alone. After spending a week with my aunties and uncles in Birmingham, we went to the Cotswolds to stay with Janet and her family. Jan was the proud Mum of a toddler and a baby when Bethany and I visited. I must admit, I was very surprised to discover that Jan was profoundly deaf. Not only had she shown no signs of it (that I knew) when we were children, but she had never mentioned it since. She was pretty awesome at coping with it, using a combination of hearing aids and lip reading. It was a bit nerve-wracking when she was driving though, because she would be looking in the rear-view mirror all the time to watch her son talking. I never told her that before, sorry Jan! We had a fun week and then went home. Since then, it has mostly been Christmas letters and the occasional email.

Several years ago, Jan got a cochlear implant. I was interested in this because I had done extensive research on the deaf community while studying for my music therapy degree. Jan's surgery was rather groundbreaking, something to do with new robotic techniques, and she was featured in a TV programme. Since then, she has become an advocate and support for potential and actual cochlear implant recipients. She also volunteers for a local charity teaching life skills to people who have mental illnesses or learning deficiencies. Not only that, but Jan is an avid biker. This girl thinks nothing of going out on a Saturday and churning out 100 miles. She rode Le Jog a few years ago, the ultimate act of hard-core biking. Well, maybe not THE ultimate, I suppose Lance might have something to say about that. But Le Jog is the route from Land's End to John O'Groats, the entire length of the British isles. It's rugged by any standard. I keep trying to talk her into coming and riding the Seattle-to-Portland, but only because I want to see her again. I suppose it might seem a bit tame after Le Jog. Jan is also a wife, Mum of two, and a businesswoman.

There, in a nutshell, is almost 50 years of a friendship.You may wonder, what makes two people hang on to a relationship where their paths cross so infrequently? Especially when, in retrospect, we only knew each other for four years and didn't ever play together outside of school. I think maybe it's because we are like-minded without even knowing it. Jan reads my blog faithfully; all of the UK entries in the sidebar are her. (Apparently her ISP wanders!) She wrote in her last email, in which she told me about her volunteer work, that a lot of the things I say and do echo her life and thoughts very accurately. So we are, as it turns out, and in the words of Anne Shirley, kindred spirits. Maybe that's the answer.

Oh, I'm sorry, did you forget the question?

P.S. I just added "visiting Jan" to my bucket list. I will take photos of us together, looking fierce on our bikes.

Auspicious beginnings

In honour of the new year, I decided to wash a load of whites.
Mostly because I was out of underwear.
Which necessitated clearing off the dining table so that I could wash the tablecloth so that it would be clean for my un-New-Year's-Eve party tonight.
I picked up my purse to put it away and noticed that it was full of crap.
So I cleaned out all of the random papers that had accumulated.
Then I noticed a credit card in my wallet that I never use any more, so I started on the wallet.
I made piles on the counter: recycle, cut up, throw away.
Then, on the counter, I saw the pile of Christmas cards and photos that kind people had sent.
So I sorted those into piles: recycle, throw away, cut up to use for gift tags next year.
Put a DVD back in its cover and noticed the mess of movies on the floor by the TV.
Cleaned up the movie mess.
Finally, back to the tablecloth.

My grasshopper ways will be the undoing of me yet.

Another thought on that last post on creativity.
I used to have a bumper sticker on our old Vista that said "Boring women have immaculate homes." I still subscribe to the philosophy, although I do like a tidy home and always aspire to it. I've decided that I'm a goal-oriented person. Hence, the party tonight. Today, in addition to visiting the Evergreen Aviation Museum (home of the Spruce Goose) with our free passes from the library, we will be cleaning house. Nothing like a party to get the old cleaning juices flowing. If you're reading this and didn't get a call from me, crash it anyway.

May we all have a happy and productive 2010.

My trusty sidekick

A creative mess is better than tidy idleness.

I don't remember my first sewing machine. I learned to sew in Intermediate School when I was about 12. I've no doubt my Dad was thoroughly excited for two reasons. First, my eagerness to use my new talent would save us money. Two, I became creative, and my Dad was all about being creative. He could look at anything and figure out how to make it himself, then go home and do just that. From then on I sewed almost all of my clothes, plus most of my sister's and my Mum's clothes as well. Skirts, pants, blouses, jumpsuits, ballgowns. All I needed was a few hours on a Saturday to churn out whatever new lovely I needed for a hot date that night or church the next day. I remember sewing couch cushion covers, piped all around, when Dad got it in his head that he could re-upholster an old couch.
At some point I acquired a snazzy Elna, which I loved and took with me when I moved to Wellington and then back home again after my Dad died. Due to voltage differences, it stayed in New Zealand when I moved here in December 1979, but the first thing Jeff and I bought after we got married was an inexpensive sewing machine. I sewed for a drill team in Huntington Beach that first year and made dress samples for a friend in the fabric business after that, so I felt justified in upgrading to my trusty Viking a couple of years later. It cost $475, which was a small fortune at the time, but I was earning money on it and, once again, sewing all of our clothes on it. I made Jeff a brown, wool suit shortly afterwards.

Here it is, almost thirty years later, almost none the worse for wear. It did lose its zipper foot sometime back, a victim of one child or another, so I have to hand-sew all my zippers. Not a big sacrifice, because I avoid zippers like the plague anyway, and they actually look better when they're sewn by hand. I suppose I could buy a new zipper foot, but that would be too easy.

The machine got a real workout when the kids were little, I even sewed the girls' underwear. I never attempted boy's underwear, for obvious reasons. Then, when they were all teenagers, it lay idle for months at a time, except for making prom dresses and curtains and the occasional bit of mending. Since Kenzie was born, the old Viking has seen a resurgence in activity. That girl loves her dresses and skirts, so it's been fun to get creative again.

This is the result of my break from work. Nine baby blankets, a music bag, a shopping bag, and (not pictured) a cover for my doumbek.

What's a doumbek, you ask?

That's my drum. It is a very special doumbek because it has a tambourine inside.

My big push for 2010 is to be creative with all of the fabric and yarn and doodads that are in my so-called sewing room. Somebody asked me, why don't you just give it away? Well, I suppose I could, but I'm needing a challenge. This will do until I can figure out the bigger one.