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Wednesday, April 30, 2003 ( 4/30/2003 08:21:00 PM ) DN 
My garden. I’m attempting vegetables again. Lord knows I shouldn’t. I poured a thousand gallons of water in a big pot last summer for one spindly tomato plant that bore 4 tomatoes, which I don’t even like. This is why I’m trying again. Katie read many, many children’s books (years and years ago–when she was just a kid) that featured carrot patches. We tried growing carrots for the past two summers, but we have a bunny in our back yard who hides in the shrubbery & eats sunflower and carrot sprouts. This year, I’m growing the carrots in a raised bed. This is a picture of it. There is a row of chives, one of onions, two of carrots, and one each of four kinds of peppers. That’s it. I’ve planted a bean vine & gourds somewhere else, but that’s all my edibles. I have high hopes this year. My gardening efforts are intense in March and April, & very slack from May through September. Wish me luck. # Saturday, April 26, 2003 ( 4/26/2003 07:31:00 PM ) DN There's a new website I've been visiting compulsively for several days. Called Arts & Letters Daily, it consists of links to current articles, news, book reviews, etc. I've discovered dozens of websites I never knew about & keep returning to pick through its teaser paragraphs, & read some more. Click # Friday, April 25, 2003 ( 4/25/2003 11:50:00 AM ) DN Smile a Mile in These Shoes! I didn’t learn everything in kindergarten. I don’t remember a counselor teaching me to Put on My Friendly Face when I’m meeting others, which is what Katie learned in school yesterday. Oh, so that’s why I scare people. My mother was right about my face freezing into an expression I guess I’d call severe, from showing it too often. Probably happened in my twenties, a decade I never want to revisit. Once in junior high (another era I generally keep inside a locked cage in my head, where we all know junior high belongs), I decided to switch from playing the clarinet in the band and do something more girly. Little did I suspect that in my new role as banner carrier, along with the high-heeled go-go boots & hot pants (what an outfit to desire!) came a single responsibility: a smile. A ceaseless smile. An eternal, interminable smile. Our junior high school band had well over 200 members, learned all music by heart, and paraded constantly from fall through spring, usually winning trophies, always in the high school category. I must have smiled for hundreds, maybe thousands of miles that year. And so I learned about the burden of being attractive, and the clarinet seemed so light afterward that later I volunteered to march with an instrument five times its size, the bass clarinet. Over the years, when strangers say to me, Smile! (a not uncommon event--see above), my responses have changed. In my twenties, I used to joke that I used up all my smiles in eighth grade, sometimes telling the anecdote. In my thirties, I’d say more briefly & aggressively, Hey, make me. Now I resist my baser impulse & tell them with a shrug, I look how I look. Maybe I’ll just start saying, I’d rather carry a bass clarinet five hundred miles than smile for you. # Wednesday, April 23, 2003 ( 4/23/2003 08:06:00 PM ) DN This is what my entire yard looks like. 
Maple Twirlies by the Thousands # ( 4/23/2003 04:59:00 PM ) DN The Univega So, my bike was stolen. For the third time in a year. This bike is pretty old - 20+ years or so, and not only is it completely out of fashion, being a 10 speed racing bike with skinny tires, but it is also unsuited to the local terrain. It is mostly level here in town, and I do ride on pavement & concrete, but you'd have to see it to believe the quality of our infrastructure in Huntington. I think the nickname of this town once upon a time was the Jewel City, but it should be something like the Rusty Bottlecap from the Sixties City now. Anyway, the sidewalks are bad, the streets are bad, and skinny tires are not the thing. The first time the bike was stolen, it had a flat and the thief abandoned it in the street just a half block away. When I called the police to report it, they already had picked it up. The second time it was stolen was the first night I had forgotten to lock it in about 4 months. I knew it was someone in the neighborhood. Someone who had been checking my bike lock every night? Kind of scary. About a week ago, I was talking by telephone from work to another neighbor & telling him about it. I said, "I have to use a socket wrench on it every morning so one pedal won't fall off. I bet whoever took it has already lost the pedal. Serves him right." He said, "Is your bike red? Because there's a guy across the street from your house who just left a red bike in front of his house." The bike disappeared before I got home, even though I crawled the alley twice looking for it in back yards. Then my son was playing across the street a few days later and came running home to tell me he had seen it. Sure enough, it was my poor, rusting bike. I stole it back, talking loudly and righteously as I took it away. The next day, I rode it to work, noticing that the 2nd thief had fixed the pedal with a new bolt. I love it when things work out like that. # Tuesday, April 22, 2003 ( 4/22/2003 03:47:00 PM ) DN Changing my blogger template today. I'm sick of the color changes in the other template.... # Friday, April 18, 2003 ( 4/18/2003 04:01:00 PM ) DN I did it. I've always wanted to start my own country, & now I have. Eadin: Stay Away from the Snakes # Wednesday, April 16, 2003 ( 4/16/2003 10:34:00 AM ) DN Today's Thoughts The reason for Monday's post was because I spent all last week looking at political blogs. The Noonan link is there because I saw a little chart dividing the world into lefties & righties, using her goofy descriptions. The biggest laugh of the week. On uggabugga.com, I believe. The most irritating thing is the crowing from the pro-war (ahem, conservative) sites, in effect, "Now that Baghdad has fallen & the Iraqis are cheering the US, what do you say now, you scum war protesters?" Can you say short-sighted, girls and boys? But today, I'm tired of looking at political blogs. I found instead a nice, comfy & fun blog - link from Rosanne - that is much better. Although it is very strange that knitters seem to love to blog. Why??? Pioneer Woman.... My hobbies are: Reading Gardening (outdoor puttering) Taking pictures Things I do a lot of but would rather not call a hobby for obvious reasons: Taking kids to birthday parties Cleaning out my kitchen drain Worry about dying (11 p.m. activity) Worry about drinking too much (7 a.m. activity) Restraining Evan's impulsivity Things I don't do enough of: Listen to music Take care of my car Play board games Make things with my hands # Monday, April 14, 2003 ( 4/14/2003 04:50:00 PM ) DN I almost never talk loudly in restaurants! Saw this reference on another blog & found the article funny. What Peggy Noonan thinks of people who do talk loudly in restaurants What if you're in a garage band *and* think you're clever? # ( 4/14/2003 10:41:00 AM ) DN Just spent a few minutes looking at a collection of the bizarre - got to the mechanical chicken plucker book & had to quit. Check it out - click # Friday, April 11, 2003 ( 4/11/2003 08:56:00 AM ) DN OMIGOD I discovered this morning, before finishing my first cup of coffee, that I am a far-left liberal! Unfortunately I didn't correctly copy the link to prove it (note the insufficient coffee mentioned above), so I went back & took the short quiz again. This time I read a little closer & answered the question about the 10 commandments differently, making me merely a liberal. Whew.  Where do you fall on the liberal - conservative political spectrum? (United States) brought to you by Quizilla # Thursday, April 10, 2003 ( 4/10/2003 03:25:00 PM ) DN Sometimes a Hero is Just a Sandwich in the Desert A question was recently put to me about just why the Army soldier Jessica Lynch is a hero. This military person, incidentally from an Army transportation division just like Lynch's, said the whole thing was her fault for not reading her maps correctly. He said, either her convoy commander took the wrong turn & she should have known it (by checking her own map), or she took the wrong turn, away from the convoy. He was completely disgusted by the term "hero" applied to a soldier who plain screwed up. Now we in WV have been wallowing in the Jessica Lynch story, for obvious reasons. My opinion is that "hero" probably is the wrong word for Lynch, but that's the kind of heart-warming story the press love -- spunky characters, danger, rescues, happy endings, etc. Plus, Lynch looks like a cheerleader: young, cute, and little-girlish. Now that's a novel view of an Army soldier. Anyway, it doesn't bother me except that iit does make for fuzzy thinking when such words are used too loosely. Anyway, I found some blogs having very lively discussions on this topic. Warning: I didn't examine either of these blogs, only the posts about the Lynch story. You may find rabidly right or left wing commentary on these sites. One and Another # ( 4/10/2003 03:13:00 PM ) DN Here's the column Anti-war rallies Why I don't protest in the streets. I'm really not a rally-goer. I get kind of freaked out around all large crowds: concerts, football games, crowded parties, etc. Something about crowd behavior makes me hyperconscious and completely unable to "go with the flow." I have never spontaneously danced, either. Yep, I'm pretty uptight. So screw you if you don't like it. # ( 4/10/2003 08:36:00 AM ) DN Well, I put my money where my mouth is several months ago and joined OVEC, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. The behavior of Massey Energy in West Va and Ky had been eating at me & their ad campaign pushed me over the edge. I don't really plan on going to any rallies, but I can vote, and protest in other ways. Tom & I have agreed on the wrongness of the Iraqi war all along, as well. We never had any hope for GWB as a great leader. We don't think Iraq was a huge threat. We think the 9/11 link to Iraq is White House spin. I suspect also that the WMD may only be Weapons of Moderate Destruction. And I think the trouble in Iraq may just be beginning, after the "war" is nearly over. Why aren't I protesting? I don't know. I don't know if anti-war rallies are doing any good. I will certainly protest by voting (not that it worked in 2000, but maybe next time). An interesting article on this topic at the LA Weekly website got me thinking. I'll post the link later, when I find it again. # Saturday, April 05, 2003 ( 4/05/2003 04:38:00 PM ) DN Yeah, was going to post about the war, but everybody else is already on the job today. Watching TV So I was watching TV the other night, and saw this commercial–well, I half saw about half of it. A man is walking down a street at night in the rain and two models, I mean young attractive women, are in a telephone booth, and the commercial ends with them opening the door and pulling him in with them, out of the rain. Your night just got more interesting, said the tag line. I'm thinking to myself, that looks really unpleasant. I'm not a man, so most of the appeal of being crammed into a phone booth with two attractive women was lost to me right there. Even if I were with the man of my dreams, a phone booth is just not the kind of place I'd like to be. It's sort of like camping on the ground. My son has the camping jones. He tried to build a shelter a few weeks ago, using a hatchet to chop thick branches from a cut-down tree in the neighbor's yard. After a good hour of chopping, sharpening his hatchet on a brick, he had perhaps fifty pieces of trimmed branches. Then he realized that his main Y-shaped posts were only long enough to build a doghouse size shelter and he gave up his plan, and went inside to watch TV. Today he is outside with a neighbor boy, trying again. He is hacking out space under a tangle of honeysuckle by the back fence, stopping sometimes to yell at Hunter to help more. Hunter is busy hunting, shooting antelope with a pop gun from a perch in the pear tree. Evan has last year's summer camp duffle bag outside with him, and his dad's ancient backpack, which straps buckle just above his knee. I haven't told him that I will never allow him to sleep in our back yard, ever. I figure he's unlikely to actually do it, since he gets the heebie-jeebies easily, so I may never have to ruin his plans. The dangers of drunks and thieves are not hypothetical in our part of town. Also the unsavory. I met the Foulest Smelling Person on Earth in our back alley a couple years ago. Not that a foul smell would ordinarily hurt someone, but if you'd met this fellow all tipped over in his wheelchair, you'd agree that it couldn't be good to be too close to him. (I righted him, of course, so he would get the hell out of my alley.) Katie's ideas of camping involve picking wildflowers and making things from vines and leaves. Since she is interested in Little House on the Prairie (when she first saw the TV show, she instantly recognized Michael Landon to be Pa, while he was still traipsing through a field in the middle distance.) When we go camping in June, we'll be staying in a semi-primitive cabin in Cabwaylingo State Forest. We are going to have a old-time day at camp this year, with no electricity. I am not mentioning my plan to use the indoor toilet. We'll cook outside, and have a fire in the cabin at night. Maybe we'll put the kids to bed outside, so they won't find out we're reading by lamplight at midnight. The cabins are old, built from really huge logs, and smell of creosote. They also have electricity, a working bathroom, and beds. I mentioned to someone recently that I liked to camp, but I didn't sleep on the ground. He said, "You're not that old," and I replied, "No, but I am old enough to know I don't want to sleep on the ground, and I don't have to, so I don't." Rosanne thought this story was funny, since it echoed her opinion on horse riding. She is old enough to know that she doesn't want to and doesn't have to, so she isn't going to. We were both reminded of Fran Liebowitz's comment about exercise: "Exercise is like gym, and I'm out of high school and I don't have to take gym anymore." Which just now reminds me of Martin Mull, or somebody–not him, he was the one who sang about the white man's blues–"I woke up this mornin', I felt so low down deep inside, woke up this mornin', felt so low down, I threw my drink across the lawn"–but somebody who said he tried to take up jogging but the ice kept flying out of his drink. # ( 4/05/2003 02:32:00 PM ) DN I was at a book club meeting where we were discussing My Antonia. The English professor there obviously was a big fan of Willa Cather, and she gave us a wealth of details about her life and works. One thing she told us was how Cather wrote My Antonia while camped in a meadow in New England one summer. We spent too much time hearing about Cather’s life and critical reputation, but things got lively when we got to talking about the romanticism of the book as a whole. What interested me was the nostalgic longing throughout the book coming from Jim Burden, the solid, educated, but empty lawyer (I believe that’s what he did for a living). A dispute arose over whether Jim’s burden of regret over the lost beautiful days of youth was a pitiable delusion. I think that the emptiness he felt later had more to do with the choices he made and didn’t make rather than the validity of his memories. Youth is granted more sensation, more inexpressible experience, more profound moments than maturity. Existentialism dissolves before newness; later we must come to terms with it every morning just so we can get out of bed. I remember great suffering in my very ordinary childhood. Not being skilled enough to avoid the banal (although the banality would result from my inadequate descriptions, and not because those occasions were inherently dumb or small), I will merely go on to say I also remember moments of elation and exhilaration arising without provocation: a brilliant winter day, riding a bicycle as fast as I can possibly go, warm winds blowing through a screen door in summer, playing with other children through many dusky evenings in West Virginia. I would not trade the wisdom I possess and my self-knowledge for the chance to experience things as a child again. Experiences gradually form the full self and that pure enjoyment of them supports the growth of the person. Also, how can we feel contempt for what we fed on in our childhood? The artist in a book like this one recreates them for us - not in their original state but with context supplied from without. Add your own interpretation, and stir well. # Friday, April 04, 2003 ( 4/04/2003 03:24:00 PM ) DN Here's someone else who feels just as I do about criticizing government during war! Click # ( 4/04/2003 03:12:00 PM ) DN Many things on my mind this week. War; band-aids; that commercial with the guy being pulled out of the rain & into the telephone booth with two girls; ramps (the West Virginia kind), and more. I hope to rant at length tomorrow since I have to put in overtime on my crappy job tomorrow – oops, I mean my small business. # |
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