Tag Archives: Holidays

Fourteen Dozen Thumbs

07 Friday Sep 2018

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Google 70’s crocheted plant hangers. Check those babies out. I can’t make them. Not on your life and not on mine. Google dazzling, adorable baby sweaters. Not made by me. Google easily made by a six year old paper snowflakes. Nope. Not scissored by these fingers.

This being stated, I come to the annual conumdrum: the holiday. That quartet of angsts and chocolate marathons: Halloween then trip into Thanksgiving and oh yeah, gay and fah lah lah Christmas and sometimes even New Years. Those festive crowd pleasing eat me into a coma days.

Except its just me and the hubster. No festive crowds milling at our door or at our dining room table. No anxious oldsters clamoring for a ride over the ridge and through the mashed potatoes to our humble double wide.

So do what to make those days festive and fun and clamped into our memory boxes? That is one tall order. How many Scrabble games can be played? How much sitting around glued to the DVD player or the CD player do we want to do-si-do to?

I am trying to limit sugar intake and sugar munching and sugar ingesting. I am trying to also limit calories. Note the word trying as in trying not to shred my nerves as I shred my sanity. The hubster is very good at making butterscotch candy- the real deal, butter and honey and all boiled to a fine, chewy fizzle. And he is attempting to live past say, sixty-five. So…. I possibly will stretch the cumber band with another apple pie that has zero refined sugar in it but does feature white flour and shortening. Note to brain- again- food is not the end all for noting the passing of another Special Day.

This is where the toilet comes in. (No. Not bulemia.) The White Pony- maybe yours is an Appaloosa. Mine is white and boring. And needed. And aggravating when it does not work properly. We talked around the idea of activities. Things to do instead of cramming more carbs down our gullets on our upcoming Special Day. Buy a model off e-bay. Fine. Would either of us be able to figure out how to turn that flat item into a three D wonder? Without cursing the other’s hair purple? Probably not and then: do what with the item if we do get it into a recognizable shape? Yes. Do what?

This line of questioning led us back to the toilet. In a few years we probably will shut the door on this mobile. I hate that the day is coming but it is. If we plan to sell this shebang, we need to make it more normal, middle class, and well, up to snuff. This is where the toilet comes in. Hubby has replaced a toilet in another place so he can do it again. I am not that talented. He is. I guess we found our Christmas activity: the replacement of the hall bathroom’s toilet. Its practical, it costs about as much as the vintage Mouse Trap game on e-bay and it probably will snag in a buyer better than not having a working toilet. If nothing else, I can spend the day reading and rereading the How to Easily Install Your Toilet manual.

For Halloween? Maybe that day hubby will turn the power off entirely, get his handy screwdriver out and put the cover back on that fits over the dryer plug in. That will ensure that when that plug comes out again, and yes, there is an again, he won’t get a shock that will make him feel like he lives in the Munster’s mansion.

Thanksgiving I haven’t quite puzzled out. Maybe that will be another session of decluttering a closet. Or maybe we will go on a Scrabble marathon or even Yahtzee.

At least my list has a fatter girth than it had this morning. And we can always repeat tonight’s game. Hubby says: I need ibuprofen. Where do you keep it? I look on the bathroom vanity edge. No. Maybe its in the backpack? Maybe I hadn’t unpacked it from our last road trip. No again. He finally got down on his hands and knees and reached around under the vanity. Yes! Fred kitten had had a friendly tussle all on his own. He’d grabbed the rattly bottle of ibuprofen and chucked it under that vanity then off he’d headed to find something else to do. So…. we probably will have something else missing by Thanksgiving. I’m pretty sure Fred is working on that right this very moment.

New book of holiday tales!

04 Monday Dec 2017

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In case anyone was on tenterhooks about this, I actually decided to celebrate the winter holiday this year. We made a pretty neat tree with more lights than I thought possible to put on one, topped off with a stuffed penguin. There are gloomy days right now, even here in sunny Arizona and the lights […]

via The suspense is over — Mindflight

Closing In for 2013

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on  January 3, 2013 at 12:20 PM

For those with chickens you probably know that egg production goes way down in the winter months at least for those of us who have more or less aux naturalle coops. I’d known that light played a role in the disposition of hens to be active and possibly produce but I didn’t know quite how significant that role might be.

I’d rigged a power line from the house to the coop, a distance of about 75 feet, with intentions of providing a heater if temperatures dropped too low but the weather has been reasonably mild most of this season. Our six hens were behaving very sluggish and egg production was down to about .666667 per day with one valliant hen following through with the goods. Last Saturday I bought a high intensity reading lamp with one of those newfangled bulbs which draw only 20 watts of power. I hung the lamp from a coop rafter with a piece of wire and we plugged the power line into one of those nifty light switch sockets that let’s you turn things on and off without bending and unplugging. We’ve been turning on the chicken light in the morning sometime before 8:00 and letting it burn till about 8:00 PM. Immediate results; Chickens are active, seem happier. Egg production is up to more like 1.75 a day (Those fractional eggs are a bit messy but we’re hoping for an even number any day now!) I’ll keep you posted on the recovery rate of egg production and mental health of hens.

Glynda

New Year’s Message

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 31, 2012 at 11:55 PM

Dr. Bill Aimes, my U.W. Communications History prof, told us that if we wanted to be assured of of being remembered by succeeding generations we should take time every day and write down what was going on in the world and what impressions we had of it and what other people were saying about it. He said that diaries are typically tedious sources of historical information, adding that the diaries of Women from the 19th Century were especially bad because accounts of overland journeys for example were typically filled with ruminations on bowels and bladder. (As it happens I’m having some intestinal complaints at the moment but won’t take further space discussing them.)

I’ve never disciplined myself to do a current events journal on a daily bais what I guess we’d call a news blog today but I do take time every January 1st to set down what I’ve accomplished in the past year, what I hope to do in the following year and what events in the news over the past year have seemed particularly significant to me. Of course to more recent event from last year will more likely tend to be remembered than those from last January. I started this practice when I was a Junior in high school, back when nobody owned personal computers and nobody suspected that personal computers would be primarily used as communication devices when they were available. I think the first time I did my annual summary I simply had a few items of interest of which I wanted to keep track and decided to handle it as a short report. The idea seemed good so the following year I wrote something longer and more structured. I kept up the practice through college and most of the years after and I’ve been pretty faithful for the last couple of decades.

I guess if I had to justify the human race to an interstellar council like in Heinlein’s “Have Space Suit Will Travel” I’d just as soon not base my defense on 2012. Between many public and mass murders, a shooting of a high school girl advocating for women’s rights in Afghanistan, a gang rape of a woman in India on a public bus! And the general background bellicosity with which we’re all too familiar, it appears that some portion of us at least are bidding for attention of a very negative sort. Our presidential election was another glum choice between unpalatable alternatives. Again our Congress is holding the country to ransom because they’d rather be premadonnas than do the work they are elected (and paid) to do.

Even at the worst of times, there are rays of light. A couple of decades ago a young girl being shot because of daring to seek education for herself and others might have passed entirely unnoticed. In the wake of the gang rape, women (and some young men) in India are militating against the common abuse of women. There appear to be some signs, however sluggish that the economy may be rallying. We may as a country be trying to come together around the idea that we aren’t providing adequate protection for our children. As to how we should address this of course, we’re as divided as ever but at least we have a common ultimate objective. We have probes on Mars. We have commercial orbital resupply capability for the International Space Station and near-at-hand human transport capability from the same source. We have good directions in which to turn if only we will take them. On my three acres I’m trying to show sustainability potential and a sort of eco-techno ambassadorship.

The year just past was a questionable one but not a lot worse or a lot better than some others in recent memory. If it has a lesson to teach I think it is along the line of remembering. I mean let’s remember what’s going on right now and next time we get a chance to stand up and make a choice let’s remember and act accordingly. Keep track of your State and Federal Representatives and if they appear to be part of the deadlock rather than part of the across-the-aisle reachers, remember that and vote those folks out of House and Senate, State Legislature and City Council. Let’s get some new blood flowing, some new idea perculating. Let’s see what we can do about reintroducing statesmanship instead of inventorying Deadwood. To many people the number thirteen is unlucky but I’m not aware that there need be anything wrong with two thousand thirteen!

Blessings to all for the New Year.

Glynda

 

The Santa Message

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 24, 2012 at 12:30 PM

Well tonight’s the night and NORAD makes it official. Santa has 24 hours to visit something like one billion homes, some of them Down Under and in South America where it’s summertime now. There’ve been some cute items on NPR lately, an interview with United Postal Service administrators concerning the size Santa’s organization must be to transport and eviler so many parcels. Another item was a physicist asserting that Santa must use wormholes to reach our houses as even travel at the speed of light couldn’t get him everywhere fast enough to get the job done in one day.

I think I was pretty young when I decided that it just wasn’t on to visit all of the houses in one night for one man no matter how magic. I hadn’t thought yet of parallel time lines allowing a person to loop back in time and perform a lot of things simultaneously but I’d heard of Santa’s helpers and had pretty much decided that there was a large crew of sleighs out there in the Christmas Eve sky going down chimneys and bringing cheer. When it came time to bring our daughter somewhat out of the open-eyed fantasy of childhood and a bit at least into the Adult Conspiracy we told her that Santa was very very busy and we needed to help Santa do some of his work so we delivered presents to certain neighbors. Later at a feminist gathering in Seattle we learned of Ms. Claus and how she was about bringing food, clothing and feminist literature to deserving children large and small.

However we imagine it happening and however we picture the personage himself, don’t we all still believe at some level in Santa and if someone comes to our house, down our chimney, through our window, out of our closet, however he gets there, that we were singled out to have a visit from the Real Santa?

It’s been said that Santa doesn’t come to poor people’s houses. Jesus does. That’s a fine sentiment in it’s way but I’ve known Santa to visit the homes of Jewish, Budhist, Islamic children- in a secular way perhaps, but bringing joy all the same. Christmas is overcommercialized. Of course it is. We’ve known that for decades but there is still magic in Santa, in those gifts that are small, nearly incidental, yet having the ability to charm as much as the big-ticket items.

I gave my friend a pack of modeling clay in Seventh grade and we spent hours making things together, two blind kids sort of coloring together in a way but shaping rather than crayoning. When I was much, much older I got one of those bendy rubber animals which you can pose. Mine was a bull I believe. My daughter and I spent I don’t know how long doing the most non PC things to that poor bovine that we could think of; having it take a poop, thumb it’s nose, anything a child and an often childlike adult could imagine.

Yes, Santa is out there. We all know him/her but Santa’s a busy person and can always use the help. Try sneaking a crate of Manderins onto your neighbor’s stoop or mailing an anonymous package of Anything to someone you hardly know. Use the address of the corner store of local tavern as return. Buy a kid a gyroscope. Learn how to make butterscotch. It can be secular as hell but still magic. It really is better to give than to receive because generally it’s more fun but we need to know how to receive and that’s really what Santa is all about.

Seasonal Giving

24 Saturday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on December 21, 2012 at 12:15 AM

I attended an office gift exchange yesterday and my Secret Santa gave me the same thing I’d given her: Starbuck’s gift cards. That was okay except I’ve pretty much given up drinking coffee except in one or two contexts and I don’t need the sweets. The whole thing got me thinking about Holiday gifts in general and how stocking stuffers have transformed from oranges and Yo-yos and decks of playing cards when I was a kid (yes folks, really, truly) to palm pilots and cell phones.

A great deal has been said and written about how electronics pretty much rule the lives of young people in particular from computers large and small to personal communication devices to online networks which I don’t even particularly want to comprehend. Recent events which I’ve already spoken of in this blog again strongly suggest that among our most dangerous neighbors is a propensity for certain kinds of militaristic video games. Of course I’m not saying that anyone who plays a mass destruction video game is a sociopath or will become one but in the last 20 years or so I have noticed a tendancy toward turning Inward among younger people.

What I mean by Inward is a tendency to look into the system whether it be a computer game, a communication network such as Facebook, or a cellpphone which plays games with you and shows you the weather while you’re waiting for that all-important call. All this is going on Inside the system, network app, whatever.

I’m not decrying electronics. I’m a technologist myself and electronics are one of the most enormously transforming growth industries of the last century or so but shouldn’t we expect even more? Computers, phones, cyber nets do stupendous things within electronic memory. They certainly flummox me and I’m a reasonably good programmer. If you look at some of the things a person can dooutside the network, by this I mean from the network outward, we can see that we might be unnecessarily limiting ourselves.

This Christmas I bought matching lasers for my grown-up daughter and her friend. This is something I could only (and did) dream about when I was younger. What do you use a personal laser for? Hell, whatever you use a laser for, burn stuff, melt stuff, pop balloons!   Take a look at The Cupcake CNC at makerbot.com and you’ll see a way to externalize a computers thoughts into something you can hold in your hand and use for many, many purposes. There are teaching robots which are essentially mobile erector sets with access to PC brains which can be modified and augmented in myriad ways. It’s possible to fly a model airplane a hydroplane or a helicopter from the computer. All these things get give us the gritty, challenging, often frustrating texture of real world experience and since the science fiction days of the 1950s I haven’t heard of a roboticist who committed mass murder.

Certainly let’s give our kids, spouses, students, computers and communication devices but for Goddess sake let’s give them also things to hook up to them which help them understand and utilize the wondrous variety of phenomena, effects and processes going on in the world around us. Let’s build a miniaturized, electronically controlled winery with the output of which we may toast the future!

Glynda

Useful Things

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

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Originally posted on November 21, 2012 at 8:00 PM

Thanksgiving and the process of giving thanks of course means different things to different people and at times like this when I try to take time to check in with my thankfulness subroutine I tend to think about progress made. Not just things accumulated though that’s part of it, but ways of doing things, remembering to get things done, quality of living emotional as well as physical.

Back in the ‘80s we were quite poor by most standards but we were thrifty and imaginative. We bought a wheat grinder, a Foley food mill, built a dehydrator and set about turning sacks of wheat into bread and cake, culled apples into sauce and juice. We turned waste meat from the meat saw at our local butcher’s into soap and cat food. We dried everything from throwaway grapes to boxes of nectarines found at the top of the grocery dumpster. This was also one of our more successful writing/publishing periods. As I wrote at the time “We would roothog or die (preferably roothog.)”

A tiny rental house in Sedro Woolley, Washington was our learning ground to accumulate skills needed in the back woods of Northern Idaho Where we juiced Serviceberries, made pemmican from prunes and ground beef heart which leftover fat from doughnut making. I could start with a pile of wood and a sack of wheat from the local feed store and turn them into bread loaves. In 1985 we returned to Seattle and things were a little easier in some ways. Eventually we increased our monetary income several fold and now we own three acres and two houses.

With everything there are tradeoffs. When we were underemployed we had lots of time for turning whatever we could get into something closer to what we wanted. As more and more time was spent away from the old homestead stalking salary, less and less time seemed to go into those old and dear processes which had sustained us when we were much younger. It didn’t happen immediately or all at once, but bit by bit Lenore and I began around 2000, reclaiming the best of what we’d had when we were poor. First we reclaimed our fruitcake, always made Sunday after Thanksgiving Thursday, accompanied by a rescreening of “The Homecoming,” pilot to “The Waltons.” We bought a greenhouse, a large steamer. I’ve ground hundreds of pounds of grain, legumes and nuts entirely by hand over the decades and decided that time constraints justified an electric mill. We revitalized our interest in gardening, moved into the County so we could have chickens, planted herbs as well as vegetables and fruit.

Looking at things this Thanksgiving I find I have less to miss and I’ve done not a bad job of keeping faith with my earlier self. I know how to do a great many of the things I wanted to do when I was 25. At this end of harvest time I am thankful for hand-cranked food mills, a 32-gallon sparging vessel, a grain mill, numerous sacks of varied grain in my home office, a cute chicken coop with six hens, food steamer, the skills of hand and mine to transform a piece of property and much else I could hardly even imagine in 1985.

Goddess be praised.

Glynda