Changing direction

okay maybe not so much changing direction as finding it again. I have, in the words of Hillary Clinton, decided to bloom where i was planted and stop making excuses that I have not achieved my potential and just achieve it. So at work, do the absolute best I can as a manager. In my personal life, let my creative voice emerge. Stop suppressing it, stop using as excuse that no one will care, no one will understand, you need to be mroe like us, they don’t think this is who I am, etc etc bull crap Just go for it.

I am in the process of redecorating my basement and changing it from an unused mess to a design/art/sewing/art quilt studio. Never mind whether or not I  can actually do these things, make the space and it will come. I intend to post pictures of my progress, as soon as I take some. I just upgraded my phone to an LG LNV3 an it has a 3m camera so pictures should be good quality for online.  Also, I like to try lots of things (creatively speaking) that I am finding lots of people do not, so when I do I will post info and even instructions. Next up a cat tree. The ones they have for sale at the pet store are butt ugly, carpet covered ewww crap. So let’s see if we can come up with something better. I found some links to better ideas that I do not want to purchase, although I might if mine turns out crappy. Here is my latest fledgling art quilt I made for a class I am taking. Monochromatic color scheme, think of it as moonrise over the lake. What lake I could not tell you, but it turned out ok I think.I like it.

Xmas

How do people remember blow by blow details of things that happened to them when they were a kid? I am more of a vignette girl I guess. I remember incidents but not what people said or the color of their clothes, for the most part. Anyway, Christmas at our house.

We had lots of kids and not a lot of money. Nine kids. Dad worked, Mom did not. We lived in a crappy house. So not much cash. But somehow Mom always produced tons of presents. I think I would have become a less conflicted person if she had just sat us down and told us look, we can’t afford to buy 120 things, don’t be such a selfish brat. But she didn’t, and the stress of it made her very ill on many a Christmas. I did the same thing for my kids as far as number of gifts goes, although it was easier for me to afford it. I wish I hadn’t. I still feel guilty at Christmastime if I don’t buy them a lot of things and I really hate that feeling. I wish I had done it differently. I hope they do it differently. 

From what I remember my Dad bought the tree and one of my sisters went with him to make sure it wasn’t too awful. That may not be accurate but it seems like it is. The tree was always bad anyway but no one really cared. We always put it in a big bucket filled with wet sand (from the creek) and then my older sisters would fill in the bare spots with extra branches cut from the bottom (maybe that just happened one time). We had this string of huge lights, colored, the ones you can still buy to light the outside of your house with but are too hot for a tree. Luckily we never had a fire. I think my sister still has that string of lights. And oh my God, the tinsel. Tinsel is one thing I never put on my tree now. I think the tinsel served to give everyone a chance to decorate. I guess we thought it looked good, or maybe that didn’t matter.  There was always a lot of arguing as to where the ornaments would go. There was tacky garland, and then there was the tinsel that got rearranged by anyone who walked up to the tree. I remember we had a cardboard star covered with foil. It was beautiful.

Mom always baked Christmas bread and distributed it to the neighbors. I forget what it was called. It was shaped like a wreath and had cherries on the top. I didn’t really like it but we had it for Christmas breakfast every year. There was also homemade candy, red and green and lots of Christmas cookies. My sisters have kept these traditions; I have not. Traditions and celebrations don’t mean a whole lot to me, which is unfortunate, because my kids don’t really have any. Maybe they will create their own.

Favorite Christmas gifts? This is why kids don’t need tons of gifts at Christmastime. I don’t remember many. My favorite was roller skates. Dad wouldn’t let girls have bikes. He said we would get hurt riding in the street. So we got roller skates and we rode them in the street. We rode them everywhere. Shoe skates with four metal wheels that vibrated when you rode them at full speed down the street. I remember having roller skates from the time I was 5 until maybe ten or twelve, so it must have been a regular thing. I do not remember my brothers having roller skates though, now that I think of it. They had bikes. Most of our gifts were destroyed way before the next Christmas came along; we were not gentle children. Baby dolls got haircuts or operations or met other fates. Other toys just didn’t hold up. There were always craft type gifts that were made and then cast aside. Mom would make clothes and we would have a new outfit to wear to church. I used to pray for a new dress from the Sears catalog but that never happened.

By far the best thing about Christmas was staying up all night, waiting for morning to come. We would have our traditional snacks, for some reason, to pig out on Christmas Eve. Chips and onion dip is all I can remember. Probably candy. My Dad and my older brothers stayed up late drinking, very loud and obnoxious. Before they went to bed the gifts came out, and they assembled and then ran down the batteries of anything that needed to be put together. You had to wait until they finally went to bed in the wee hours of the morning before you could sneak out and see the loot. Then you had to wait until at least 6 AM before you could expect to be able to get Mom and Dad and the rest up again to open presents. In the meantime we would sit and ‘watch’ the presents, play in the big stone fireplace, sneak peaks at presents and wrap them up again, trade secrets (if you tell me one of yours I’ll tell you one of mine). 

I can’t really think of what might have been the best Christmas ever. I guess it was just the sameness of it from year to year that made it special. In contrast, my kids always liked to sleep in on Christmas morning, we never went to church on Christmas Eve, and last year I spent Christmas absolutely alone. So it goes.

101 ways to use bamboo

I’ve decided the theme of this blog will be stories from my childhood. Not necessarily because it was a great childhood but it was a very free childhood. In the foothills of Southern California,  in a canyon called Kagel with an awesome combo  country/biker/bohemian/hippy/artsy atmosphere, if you can picture that. From what little I can find to read about it now, the spirit remains. My brother is buried there, at the top of the canyon at Glen Haven, right out on the road under a tree, where he could look out at the canyon he loved forever, Mom said. My brother was the creative juice behind the many games we played, long before there were video games or even (for us anyway) color tv, and many of our games involved bamboo.

Running down the center of the canyon is a creek, or “the creek” actually. My father always forbade us from playing in it because he said we would catch typhoid fever. It was rumored that a girl drank the water once and died of typhoid fever. This was not entirely unbelievable since many families, ours included, let the water from washing machines run into it, septic tanks overflowed into it, trash was dumped into it. We played in the creek regardless. Creek games are for later posts, but it is important to mention because since we lived on the creek lots of bamboo grew near our house. A creative child can find many uses for bamboo. 

Pull off all of the leaves but a few at one end  and tie a piece of string to the leaf end for reins and  voila, you own many horses and can turn your front yard into the Ponderosa. Leave the leaves on and cut the bamboo poles into foot long pieces and you are a farmer growing corn. A swing set with slide comes in handy here for harvesting the corn. Pull all of the leaves off and you can running a logging camp (this involves the creek again, after a hard rain when all of the creek moss has been washed away).

The bamboo patch in our front yard, down by the creek bank, had a place I used to use as a secret hiding place. Hard to describe, but the bamboo at the front of the patch had been bent over until they were laying across the retaining fence that was supposed to keep the creek embankments from eroding. If you pushed the bent over poles aside there was maybe a 4′ by 4′ space inside that looked out on the creek. Once inside, no one could see you inside (or at least I don’t think they could, I was a little kid). I thought it was an amazing secret hiding place.

We had designated the area next to the bamboo in the back yard as our pet cemetery. We had many pets over the years, mostly cats, and life being much different than it is now, at least in suburbia where I now live, we had lots of pet funerals. Cats lived outside, and got hit by cars. Over the years there was so much erosion to our backyard that eventually the little cat bones started poking out.  I don’t remember being grossed out by it, just intrigued. Hey look, the bones are poking out!

We spent countless summer days playing with bamboo, and now they are making t-shirts and floors out of it. Go figure.  

anouk

Move the cheese already

Since 1994 (when I bought my townhouse) I have had this little struggle in my front yard to deal with every time I need to water my shrubs and flowers. Rather than put the water connection where they should be in our row of townhouses, like where the owner can get to them, everyone’s water spigot is convenient for everyone’s neighbor. So when I need to use my hose I have to go either climb through my shrubs or go to my  neighbor’s walkway and step through his flower bed to get to my water. I did this for 15 years! Last weekend it suddenly dawned on me that, duh, I could move the plants around so that I could more easily get to my water spigot. Besides, my yard was ugly and needed a redesign. So I dug up and threw out the ugly back row of shrubs, moved an azalea in the front over to one side, and put in some flat stones to use as a little walkway to my water connection. It was muddy and sweaty and hard work and  I got bitten by spiders, and I still have some planting to do to finish it up, but it already looks much better and I feel good about it. 

Moral: If something in your life doesn’t feel right, stop dealing with it and CHANGE IT! It might take some work, but it will be worth it in the end. And that applies to much more than landscaping.