Sewing chat

Gentlemen, if you would excuse us, I'd like to ask the ladies something.

Ladies, if you sew, do you suffer some sort of strange distortion of your judgment-related faculties when you walk into a fabric store? (Feel free to answer anonymously. I know this can be embarrassing.) The subject comes up because yesterday I got it into my head that I'd like a new skirt, and there is nothing left in the stash of cloth I originally bought to make quilts with, so for the first time in years I went into a fabric store. I almost, just very nearly, got right in and right out. After a quick swoop through the store, a nice print on a black background caught my eye and I picked it up and pondered and thought it would do and even started toward the checkout. But then I wobbled. And then I went around and around the store, half-deciding on this and half-deciding on that, only to choose something else, and then unchoose it. I was having a very good time at this, you understand. I considered color after color, print after print. My imagination had a heyday.

But, finally, I decided I'd spent altogether too much time on this, especially since I'm not all that particular about what I wear (ask anybody who knows me - I don't want to be an eyesore, but fashion-concerned I'm not).

To put it another way, the time and mental effort invested in picking out the raw material for what is to be an everyday, workaday skirt had reached well-nigh ridiculous levels.

So, I decided it was time to choose.

So, I had narrowed it to two fabrics.

So (ahem), finding myself suddenly unable to choose between those two, I (cough) grabbed a bolt of cloth that hadn't even been under consideration, and took it to the checkout and bought two yards of that.

Is to laugh. Is to sigh.

Not that it hurt anything. But...

I am painfully aware that this is not the first time I have spent an insane amount of time in a fabric store, only to buy something not in the top five as chosen during that insane amount of time.

In this case, I got it home and held it in front of me while I looked in the mirror, and wondered why I hadn't noticed what an odd green the background is. And how 1970s-ish it seems. And, in general, I wondered why I bought this instead of something else.

It's not bad, you understand. It'll do. My husband seems to like it, perhaps more than I do, which is just as well because he'll see it more than anybody else, once I get it made, assuming I can manage to get it made. (I'm trying to make this, more or less, but with in-seam pockets, and midi-length. It's about as complicated as I dare tackle when attempting to sew. A talented seamstress I'm not.)

But, honestly, fabric stores seem to do something to my brain. Tell me I'm not alone in this...

Notice to local seamstresses: I found out during checkout that the fabric store is closing in a week or two. There aren't any signs or notices, but the owners are moving across the state to be closer to their kids and they're taking the store's inventory with them. I don't know anywhere else within an hour's drive to buy fabric. Do you? There are lots of online options, of course, but if you delight in browsing and feeling the fabric before you buy, your days are limited around here. Fair warning.

If I might add another sewing story...

Recently I was about to get rid of an old flannel sheet, and it suddenly struck me that there was no reason I couldn't make a winter-weight slip from it. So I folded it double, plunked a full slip on top of it, cut a rough approximation of the slip's shape, making allowance for seams, and making the straps wide and the neckline a bit higher and the slip inches and inches longer, since this is for warmth, and then sewed the two pieces together. Worked like a charm. There's enough fabric left over to make a second one. Such a deal. With a bit more attention to the top, and appropriate fabric, I think I could make a sheath dress this way. The rub there is designing the neckline and straps (or sleeves), but I've got some old regular sheets I can use for trial and error and then for a pattern, if I ever decide to get ambitious in that direction. Anyway, I couldn't find winter-weight slips, and this solved that problem nicely.

Where I've been, where I'll be

I should know by now that when someone hands me a hard copy of a book manuscript to edit, that I should declare a blog break, because once I dive into an edit run, I don't tend to come up for air long enough to follow events, much less ponder them, much less take time to write about them. So, back on August 26, when I was handed the hard copies of three books-in-progress, I should have known I'd be essentially offline for a few weeks.

But no. I always think that somehow I will squeeze in time to blog, too. I am, it seems, endowed with more than my share of optimism, or something.

Or perhaps it's just that I've learned that every time I have declared a blog break, I have been assailed by an overwhelming obsession to blog about something...

At any rate, I am trying to polish the first three books in what should be, God willing, a four or five book fictional universe. I have changes made to the first two, and am going through them again to see how well the changes hold up. Then I have to tackle the third book. Expect blogging to be light for a while yet. You, being more organized, and probably younger, and likely more talented than me, could probably manage to blog and edit books at the same time, but I'm not too good at it.

I have also been flattened by allergies. Or we think it is probably mostly allergies. But we're not sure, so I've been in self-imposed semi-quarantine for several days, on the grounds that triggering an epidemic of respiratory malfunction is not a worthy achievement. Ugh. I feel like I'm starting to come out of it. I hope I'm coming out of it. Four hour naps put a big dent in the day. (And if anybody knows why an allergy medicine that causes me no drowsiness at all most of the time can knock me into zombieland other times, you're ahead of me.)

On the upside, I was told that I sound like Lauren Bacall now. Such a deal. (That is, of course, when I'm talking, and not sniffing, sneezing, coughing, or wheezing.)

Also on the upside, I got my marriage record today. So, once I'm well enough to tackle that chore I can try again to renew my driver's license.

Word note: maelstrom

The other day I was out for a walk just before sunset, and was rewarded with a sky full of swifts, flying as only swifts fly. Around here, I'm more used to seeing flocks of swallows with the occasional swift in it, but this was, as far as I could see, a very large flock composed entirely of swifts.

If you aren't familiar with them, swifts fly with their wings held apparently stationary for a while, and then flap like mad, and when they flap, it looks like they are using one wing and then the other, left and then right, rapidly. It doesn't look like it should work. But, of course, it does.

In with all this, they swirl and swoop and change direction a lot. So, all in all, to see a flock of them feeding is to see a wondrously turbulent sky.

I stood gaping, and tried to think of a word to describe this ballet mixed with tap dancing, done in the extra-dimensional stage of the air, and the word that popped to mind was maelstrom. It didn't seem quite right, though, because it's usually used for bad situations.

I still don't think it's quite the right word, but I looked it up when I got home, and was surprised to find that my guesses about the word origins, and therefore its meaning, were off base. Rather than being a variation on mal- something, i.e. bad something, it is (according to The Penguin English Dictionary, 2nd Edition) derived from the Dutch maalstroom, from malen to grind, and strom stream.

Undocumented citizens

I have not been able to renew my driver's license, which expires soon, because the State of Oregon wants documents from me that I haven't needed before, and I have had to send off for them. Specifically, since I changed my name when I married, I must buy a copy of my marriage record from the state, to show how I got from my birth certificate name to my married name.

"Just be glad you've only been married once," the DMV clerk told me the other day, as we shuffled through the documents I could scurry up, in (vain) hopes they'd fill the bill. "Some folks have to prove how they got from one name to the next to the next to the next."

I did not have to sign the form I sent off, which struck me as odd. Later I found I could have, if I'd wanted, spent more and made my request online. I also see online where the state is no longer issuing driver's licenses over the counter, because it has gone to face recognition technology. Oh joy. In hopes of scaring off a few terrorists and con men, we all get to be treated like criminals, and have our mugs on file with the government, incorporating the latest technological means of identifying and keeping track of people. (The Department of Homeland Security begs to reassure us, however.)

My father-in-law is not well. I might have to travel a few hundred miles to help my mother-in-law. If I don't have my marriage record when it comes my turn to help (the family's working in shifts), I can either surrender my current license and get a temporary one with no photo, or I can take my license with me and let it expire and depend on others to drive me around. Oh joy. I can be without photo ID, which has foreseeable difficulties, or I can be without a driver's license, with has an entirely different set of foreseeable difficulties. I don't even want to know about the unforeseeable difficulties. If there's a way to renew from another state, I haven't found it yet. (There are a loopholes, but none I can jump through, as far as I can see.)

I am, of course, hoping that somehow I will be properly documented in time. I am trying hard to resist popping off Comrade jokes when I make it back to the Department of Motor Vehicles office and try again. I am in my 50s. I remember when government wasn't so all-fire intrusive. Or expensive. Or big. Or bothersome.

For that matter, I like to read old books. It has not escaped my attention that old books describe a world in which governments in the United States operated, for the most part, within fences they have since busted through.

So, I was at the post office late last week, and in front of me, a woman was asking the postal clerk the best way to send a passport to her son. 'Where's he going?' the clerk asked, being a friend. 'He's not traveling anywhere. He got a job, and he's got to prove he's an American citizen. He's already got the job, but...'

Whereupon the clerk said that she'd just had to fork over $50 for a certified birth certificate for her son, who needed it to stay in college.

Whereupon I mentioned my document woes, and how the certificate issued at the wedding wasn't good enough (which is a moot point for me, because for the life of me I haven't been able to find it), and I'd had to send off $20 for the paper demanded of me.

Whereupon, with another person joining in, we jointly wondered whether the new requirements were mostly about finding a new way to rake in money from the citizenry...

I don't believe that. Not that it's the primary reason, at any rate. But I'd love to see the tallies on revenue generated at the Vital Records departments of this country, listed year by year. I'm almost willing to bet they're becoming cash cows, compared to what they used to be.

Anyway, if you live in Oregon, and are a married lady and not a feminist, you might want to plan ahead. The certificate signed after the ceremony won't help you a bit, apparently. You must buy a copy of whatever got filed with the state where you got married. In Oregon, it costs you $20 for one copy, unless you want rush delivery, which you do online and which costs you $32.50. Such a deal. I don't know how much it costs to get records from other states. I'm hoping they won't take advantage of the new rules and raise the rates. I can see some state officials doing that. "Hey, look! People have to prove how they got from one name to another now. There's no way out of it if they want to drive or have official photo ID. Heh! We got 'em now, boy! Whoo-hoo!"

Yes, I am feeling a bit cynical this afternoon. Why do you ask?

Surface versus heart

Looks can be deceiving, as Robert J. Avrech rediscovered at a restaurant in Israel (see second half of the post). The comments so far are pretty interesting, too.

Now, ladies, I'm all for dressing modestly (by all means, let us support and promote ladylike dress and manners, especially amongst godly women), but he possibly has a point, don't you think?

OK, so in my life I've misjudged people based on how they dress, so I know he has a point. And for those of you who think that by linking to Mr. Avrech's post I'm campaigning for ritual, I'm not. But, I've learned the hard way that it's as easy to misjudge somebody because he engages in ritual as it is to misjudge him because of how he dresses. Ritual can shove aside honest faith, to be sure - but it doesn't have to, and often doesn't, as far as I've seen.

In the full disclosure department, and while we're kind of on the subject, I spent about half of my childhood believing I was half-Jew, on my mother's side. It turned out that I was the victim of a disinformation campaign run by my then teen aged cousin Harvey. Harvey, it seems, got sick and tired of certain anti-Semitic relatives, and thought he'd hoist them by their own petard, by convincing very young (read: gullible, excitable, ignorant) visiting out-of-state cousins that they were part Jew, and sending them out to babble this extremely cool information far and wide. (Hey, we were all related to Anne Frank! We were descendants of oppressed people! We were survivors! We had reasons for our big noses!) To make it more fun, Harvey insisted that we were Polish Jew. Polack jokes were all the rage then, you see, and so it was doubly cool to be the butt of jokes but keep our heads held high. (Did I mention we fancied we were survivors?)

The grown-ups all feigned surprise at our claims (which irritated us, as I recall - it seemed so dishonest of them), and then denied the Jewish heritage, but Harvey convinced some of us kids that the grown-ups were afraid of being thought Jewish. Us, though, we were too brave and smart to fall for, or go along with, cowardly lies denying our heritage...

(What? None of your cousins or brothers fed you stories that you swallowed, hook, line and sinker when you were a kid? Never? Ah, c'mon...)

Harvey's hope, as I understand it, was that the anti-Semitic friends of the anti-Semitic relatives would hear that they had been lunching with closet Jews, and kick the supposedly tainted people out of their too-cozy little cliques, thereby making the anti-Semitic relatives get what they'd dished out. I never heard if the campaign worked. And I've never quite decided whether to be proud of Harvey's efforts, or mortified, or a combination thereof. Usually, I feel like it's a combination thereof, with a heavy leaning toward mortified whenever I stop to think how he kept me duped and defending him for years and years.

Anyway, for years I thought I was part Jewish, and I've never quite gotten over my fascination with the more charming of the Jewish traditions. I don't subscribe to them, or practice them, but I still like learning about them.

Years after Harvey shamelessly misled us in the name of a good cause, my mother took me to Tennessee to meet the woman for whom I'd been named.

Actually, I was given my mother's name, and she had been named for this woman, but at the time I was adamantly against having been named for my mother (no other woman or girl where I grew up was named for her mother - It Simply Was Not Done - and besides which it was embarrassing to be named for a woman who had a knack, or so I thought, for causing me embarrassment with my friends), so my parents were riding out my rebellion by claiming that I'd really been named for this woman, despite what they'd told me when I was younger.

Anyway, I met this woman, and she was a remarkable sight to see. She was poised and polished, well dressed, every inch the picture of a southern lady, and she had a voice to die for, liquid, mellow, clear, with a gorgeous accent. We went out to eat, my mother, my aunt, this remarkable creature for whom I'd been named (I was honored beyond words to be her namesake now that I'd seen her), and me. When the waitress came, I quite naturally said please and thank you and looked the waitress in the eye and otherwise treated her like a human being. What else are you supposed to do, confronted with another human being, I ask you?

"We do not talk to people like that," the gorgeous creature for whom I'd been named said, dispensing instruction, dripping scorn.

Long story short, the woman for whom my mother was named, and then for whom I was named, was not prepared to regard waitresses as anything other than subhuman, nor were blacks fully human in her book, and therefore our black waitress was doubly beneath notice. My mother and my aunt were loath to ruffle the revered elder Kathryn's feathers, all the more so because she was the guest of honor at this little dinner, and so they sat there cooing at me not to disagree with her, at least in public.

I wished I could become invisible, and afterwards I briefly tried to switch to my middle name.

I'm over it now.

But it took some getting over, I tell you.

A few years after The Dinner of The Incompatible Kathryns, I considered marrying a black man - not because he was black, but because he was himself - and in the back of my mind, while I was mulling the pros and cons of the match, I treasured the idea of inviting Kathryn Mine Elder to such a wedding.

I think Harvey, at least, would have approved of the gesture.

Anyway, looks can be deceiving.

As if you didn't know that already... :)

Things are a bit crazy around here

I am laughing as I type this. Life has been so swirly and busy and crazy and grief-struck that I haven't even tried to get online for a week. So, this morning I thought I'd better at least check email, and then I thought I'd get online and say howdy. After getting kicked off once (the tech guys promise they're working on the connection problems - I hear talk of overloads which must be addressed...) I finally made it to Blogger. Blogger has been doing all sorts of tweaking since I was last on. There is, for instance, a new dashboard. Fine. I can handle a new dashboard. For that matter, it looks pretty straightforward. But my mouse pointer disappears every time it passes over a button on the dashboard. To make a new post, I couldn't click the new post button (aka 'Create') but had to go to 'Edit Posts' and work my way around to here from there.

Why this struck me as funny, I don't know. But it did.

It's certainly more humorous than much of what's been going on around here. This weekend, a man was shot to death a couple blocks from here, as the crow flies (taking roads, you have to round a few corners). The last time homicide detectives had anything to investigate in this town, it was 16 years ago, if the news reports are right. We don't even have homicide detectives. Some had to be imported for the occasion.

As strange as it sounds, I'm not sure yet if I know either the dead man or the man in jail on murder charges. They both have common first names, and this is a part of the world that doesn't use full names much. In fact, we don't even use first names much, in the general course of things. I'm guessing it's a holdover from Wild West days, when it was considered risky as well as rude to insist upon knowing somebody's name. Or perhaps we've just reinstituted the old, old ways. In a sense, we're a Giles the Butcher society, you might say. In our case, it's more like Jim At The Hardware Store, to take an example. Except, in that case, you have to go a step further, because at the hardware store, there are multiple Jims. In informal usage, they are Old Jim, Young Jim, Big Jim. This gets a bit ridiculous when it comes to the matter of obits, which are generally put out under legal names. I can't tell you how often we listen to an obit on the radio and then turn to each other and ask 'Is that somebody we know?'

We do use full names in some situations and with some people, you understand. It's just that we're perfectly content to let most folks operate without them, if they like. It's just the style of the place.

While we're on the subject, I don't know why that "everybody knows everybody in a small town" myth gets so much mileage. We have our circles and cliques and workplace acquaintances like everybody else. Plus, we have a lot of people who like to keep to themselves. Plus, we have a lot of turnover. It's hard to make a living in a small town, and people bail out all the time, especially starry-eyed newcomers who had blithely assumed they'd be able to find a job once they moved to a place because it was quiet and appealing. There are reasons we have lots of telecommuters and online sellers in our midst, believe me.

I am acquainted with the man interviewed on television and identified as the dead man's best friend. I haven't seen him or his wife yet, though. I'm not quite sure what to say to them when I see them, except 'I'm sorry to hear about your friend.' They're Catholics, which helps some. I'm not Catholic, but as fellow Christians we can look at each other and say 'it will all come out all right, in the only ways that really matter' and know at the deepest levels it's true. That doesn't eliminate the grief, by any stretch, but having God to turn to and to lean on is a good thing in a mad world.

This is, as it happens, the third killing I've been at the far edges of in about as many years. One of the soldiers kidnapped, tortured, and killed in Iraq was the grandson of a former neighbor of ours, who had his store across from our bookstore when we had it downtown in a mall. When I ran into the grandfather a few weeks afterward, I said I was sorry to hear what had happened, and then just stood there while he poured out his anger and his grief. It was mostly anger at that point, and most of it aimed at heartless and/or sloppy journalists. Then, this past winter, I sat and listened as relatives of a young mother murdered a few hundred miles from here told me what they knew about it: how she'd gone to use a neighbor's phone, and happened to be there when a gang decided to wipe out some supposed doublecrossers, and burst in, firing. This young woman wasn't in on whatever disputes were going on, they said. She just caught bullets meant for somebody else. At any rate, in both those cases I didn't need to say much. What they wanted was somebody to listen, and I can do that, I guess. It hurts. But obviously not as much as losing a loved one.

As for this weekend's shooting, somehow I missed the furor while it was going on, and it went on quite a while. The man was shot before noon on Saturday, in the front yard of his home. The cops arrived a few minutes later. The body wasn't removed until something like 4 or 5 Sunday morning, or so I understand.

You would think, this being the first killing in nearly a generation, that this would be the talk of the town. But I haven't heard even a snippet of conversation about it while out and around on my normal errands, or even at church. I expect that to change today, when the weekly paper gets solidly into circulation, and people who don't know the people involved and who don't listen to the radio get in on things. (Pause while I look up the story online to see how the newspaper handled it... Hey, now I know where both men worked, which helps some, but I still can't picture them. The story is handled professionally. Yay. The radio reports have been trying to outguess the jury, and have been calling it a homicide. The newspaper reporters have better lawyers, or better training, or more sense, or actually believe in 'innocent until proven guilty', or something. They're doing it right, at least in this article. I worked as a newspaper reporter for a number of years and although there were times I could have strangled the legal eagles or the publisher or the managing editor or the folks who wrote the style book, and although there were times I felt a perfect fool using what struck me as 'weasel words,' since then I've sat on a jury that brought in a verdict of not guilty by reason of self defense in a case where attempted murder was charged, and I know now, without question, why those rules are in place. Before it was a laudable standard, but mostly theoretical. But when you're one of the very few people who has to sift through sworn testimony and physical evidence, and then bring in a verdict not expected by people who have been primed for a guilty verdict by the press, it's no joke. And I can't even imagine what it was like for the defendant and his family.)

Anyway, on top of this, my father-in-law fell and broke a hip and we've been sweating that out. We were told, as he was taken into surgery, that at his age it was about a 50-50 chance that the surgery would kill him.

He's been up and walking already, and he's now in a nice rehab center that specializes in that sort of thing. Things are still a bit dicey, mostly because he's in his 80s, but all in all he seems to be doing amazingly well, so now we've switched to joking about how we hope he's not talking his roommate's ear off...

And then we got word that a nice young man we know was in a motorcycle accident and at last report is in a coma in a hospital out of the area...

There's more, but I'm going to go to work now.

...I am now laughing again. I went to hit the 'Publish Post' button, and my pointer disappeared. But, it stays on at the very border of the button. Maybe that will work? Testing. Testing...

Update: It occurs to me, rereading the above, that I might leave the impression that the killing in the neighborhood hasn't affected me. It has. I've had my weeping over it. I am heartsick when I think what the friends and families of everyone involved are going through. But since it seems to have been a personal argument gone bad, and since there is no indication that any sort of culture of violence seems to be brewing in the vicinity, I don't see any need to go out and buy extra bolts for the door, or stop taking walks, or otherwise feel that the town itself has become less safe. Plus, I'm dealing with my own family emergencies at the moment, which kind of sort of pushes this to the side a bit, whether it should or not.

Old potatoes

I went to make potato salad this morning, but found that some of the potatoes had gone moldy, and others had dark spots that went deep into the potato. So I said phooey on that batch of potatoes and threw them away. Not wanting mold in the house, I tied up the trash bag and hauled it to the dumpster at the end of the block.

En route, I met a retired gentleman, who called out "Here comes trouble!" when he saw me. As far as I know, that's how he greets everybody he considers a friend. (This is the American West. We have our characters.) I told him, just to pass the time of day, that I'd gone to make potato salad but the potatoes had gone bad, to which he replied that I sounded like his wife.

How so? I asked, when the spoiled veggies were properly dumped.

'She's such a tightwad,' he said. 'She always buys big bags of potatoes, but we don't use many. I'd like potatoes every day, but she doesn't like to fuss with them. They're the easiest thing to make, really, but... well... whatever. The thing is, she never waits until we're out before she buys more, but she always cooks the oldest ones first, and so we never eat anything but old potatoes.'

At this point he faltered, suddenly realizing, I think, that he was telling tales on his wife, and possibly sounding like he was accusing me of always feeding my husband old potatoes (which I don't). He shifted his eyes away from mine and muttered, apologetically, 'Anyway, that's where she is this morning. Making potato salad, to use up some of them old potatoes.'

Uhm. I hope I don't have to say this, but frugality ill applied is not a blessing, ladies. And, gentlemen, neither is being distressed by something in one's household but not addressing it. Privately. Politely.

Pale face

Last week I had a bit of dental surgery. I got one broken tooth fixed, and another broken tooth taken out. There wasn't enough of the latter tooth to fix, nor was there enough to get hold of to pull out all in one piece. (Not that the dentist didn't give it a go. I had no idea how much twist-factor the human head has built into it. I think I was happier not knowing...) Finally he drilled the tooth into pieces, and took it out slick as anything.

I declined an offer of prescription painkiller. The dentist told me that alternating Tylenol and Advil at three hour intervals was just as good. I got home to discover that in all my pre-op preparations - laying in of homemade soups, etc. - I had utterly forgotten to lay in pain pills. I had on hand enteric coated aspirin (not a good choice for anything involving active bleeding, I thought), and some generic Tylenol-type pills, which had expired in March. Not feeling up to a trip to the drugstore, and my husband being sick in bed (but valiantly offering to drag himself to the drugstore if I needed anything), about four and a half hours after the surgery I took a couple of the outdated generic Tylenol-type pills. Four and a half hours later, I took another couple. That was it. That was all I needed, and I wasn't sure I needed that. Amazing. I expected to be flattened with pain. Didn't happen. (I am now stocked with fresh pills, btw, and the outdated ones are in the trash. I don't like pushing my luck with old pills.)

I did have some face swelling, but not enough to stop people in their tracks when they saw me out and about on my usual errands. Instead I got puzzled looks, as if they could tell something was different about me, but they didn't know what.

I also, late in the game, developed a bruise on my face. But it looked less like a bruise than a smudge.

So, the other night my husband was heading for our gas station cum bookstore, which shares a parking lot with the grocery store. We'd arranged that I'd ride along and go get groceries while he got his chores done at the gas station. A few minutes before heading out, I looked in the mirror, decided I didn't like looking like a middle-aged woman who doesn't know how to wash her strangely asymmetrical face, and went digging for some face powder I thought I remembered buying a couple years ago when I got a rash or something. (I wear make-up less often than I take pain pills. These are just not things I have on hand except for special occasions.) I found the face powder, and remembered another reason I don't use it besides not liking to mess around with make-up. Being quite fair, I had bought the palest face powder. This was a mistake. It is paler than I am. By quite a bit.

I looked in the mirror again, and wished that the bruise had the decency to look like a bruise instead of a dirty face. Wishing didn't help anything. So I reasoned that if I put on the powder lightly, it might sort of kind of even out my face color a bit and thereby, logically, make the bruise less noticeable.

Wrong.

I looked in the mirror after I'd done the deed, and saw a sickly pale middle aged woman who didn't know how to wash her strangely asymmetrical face. Worse yet, something about taking away some of the pink tones made the bruise look more like dirt than ever.

But my husband was calling that it was time to go and so I laughed at myself and went. Nobody commented on my face, one way or another, so I guess it wasn't too bad overall. But when I got home I took another gander in the mirror, and laughed out loud. My 'fix' had definitely made things worse. I went to the kitchen still chuckling at my misstep, and told my husband that I'd tried to hide my bruise with face powder, but thought I'd only made things worse by making myself look paler.

My husband about melted in relief. "I hadn't wanted to say anything," he said. "But when I dropped you off at the store I thought you looked really pale and it concerned me. I didn't notice the make-up..." Of course he didn't notice the make-up. There was no reason for him to think about make-up. I almost never wear make-up. And I'd put this on lightly, and adeptly for me.

Oh great. I made myself look worse and I scared my hubby. A twofer mistake.

(In case you are wasting brainpower wondering how I could break two teeth, I was eating a salad. The salad was composed mostly of iceberg lettuce. There was nothing hard in it. But I managed to bite down just wrong. It was one of those things where you know just before it happens that something bad is going to happen, but somehow you can't stop it. For an instant, there was terrific strain, and then two molars, one above the other, exploded into pieces. This was back in November. I could have been regaling you since then with stories of trying to get a dentist appointment in this town. I'm sure that if I had lied and claimed to be in agony, this could have been fixed before now, but I wasn't in agony, so I kept getting bumped. Finally a new dentist moved to town, and I managed to be one of his first patients here. I was pleased to see that he was a white-haired gentleman instead of a kid just out of school, but I didn't know that until after I'd arrived for my first appointment. I was braced for being the patient of a rookie, if it came to that.)

This year's kitten

The kitten noise underneath the front porch has turned out to be an only kitten. It's a bit on the wild side yet, and quite stand-offish as far as dealing with people, but we're working on that. It thinks it owns the back yard, and its poor mother keeps having to call it off from trying to take on the mule deer. I am presuming that, given enough time, it will figure out that deer are dangerous, and we're not. But for now I usually see it in flashes, running for its life when it sees me. (And never mind that the grown cats it hangs out with are affectionate to the point of being pests. While it trusts them on other matters of judgment, I guess it's decided they're deluded when it comes to humans.)

Seen out the window this morning...

Usually we only get two mule deer fawns at a time (and sometimes only one), but sometimes we have three, as you can see. They're getting pretty big (that's a full size doe they're with), but they still have spots.

Slam repairs

When I was in high school, I was chosen to attend a special summer school for chemistry students, held at The College of Idaho. I was absolutely in awe of the professors and the science labs. At first.

Then one day, after explaining to us how expensive and sensitive the equipment was that he was entrusting to our use, a professor left a gaggle of us with it and went off to another room to work with other students. Soon after that, the machine jammed or otherwise malfunctioned. I can't remember for sure if it was a piece of equipment that used lasers, or what, but I remember we were terrified twice over: first because we weren't sure if we were in mortal danger (it seemed likely), and second because we had just been told what an incredibly sophisticated and expensive machine this was. That we had no idea how we'd broken it didn't help; there is no clueless like the cluelessness of wondering how you messed up a scary bit of technology while being extremely careful and cautious.

Being teens, and terrified, we kicked up a bit of a fuss, as I recall. There were screams, and people running for the professor.

The professor came in, took stock, told us to calm down, and then picked the equipment off the table and slammed it on the floor a couple of times. He set it back on the table, ran a couple of tests on it, declared that it did this all the time and it should be all right now, and then left us, our mouths hanging open in disbelief.

It worked fine after that.

I have since found that a lot of guys 'fix' things this way, sometimes successfully. Or they happily employ "a judicious use of his most basic hardware tool for such things, his fists", as James M. Kushiner puts it.

In the linked post, Kushiner laments that fewer things built these days can be fixed that way. I'm inclined to think he has a point. (Although, to be sure, I've been surprised again and again what can be fixed that way. Not that I recommend it, necessarily, you understand. :)

Rumor control

Sigh.

Our bricks and mortar bookstore is inside a gas station, which we lease. Until a few days ago, the gas station had a very tall sign upon which the prices were displayed. It was an old sign. It didn't look good. And it was horribly difficult to keep up to date. To change the prices, someone had to use an insanely long rod with a suction cup at one end, and, one by one by one etc., remove and replace numbers. It took rather a lot of strength and coordination to get the job done. I couldn't do it. My husband couldn't do it. Most of our employees couldn't do it, either. The ones that could do it sometimes hated to do it, and I can't blame them. In good weather it was hard. In bad weather, particularly very cold weather, it was the sort of job that could reduce a grown man to tears and/or animosity toward the universe. In all weather conditions, it was hard to not lose grip on the numbers at the wrong time - i.e. before they got delicately maneuvered into place. The numbers were prone to breaking even without falling horrendous distances to the ground. It was not a happiness-promoting system.

So, the other day, the parent company had the sign taken down. I don't have proof to show you that some of us danced jigs of joy to have it gone, but I assure you, we were happy. Very happy. We don't know what they're going to do eventually about replacing it, but we have petitioned, wholeheartedly, for them to save their money and let us just use the reader boards or put up a short sign, or something like that. Anything, you understand, that doesn't require us to go back to the insanely long rods with suction cups, which only a few people can master, and nobody likes.

So, today my husband told me that of the responses he's gotten so far to the sign being gone, about half are people saying how much better it looks around there now, and the other half are asking if we're going out of business.

No, folks. We got rid of an eyesore that cost us grief and money to keep up. That's it.

If you hear any rumor to the contrary, will you please squash it? Thank you.

In the meantime, I think I'll go and polish the windows and otherwise do whatever I can think of to make it clear that we're a going concern. We are even considering getting fresh, colorful banners. We've never had banners, but the sort that you see at car lots are pretty cheap. And they'd look new. Which might take people's minds off the old sign. Maybe.

If you can successfully anticipate the wild leaps of logic to which people are prone, you are way ahead of me. It never occurred to me, not once, that people might think we were going out of business because we're taking steps to improve and update the appearance of the place.

Silly me.

We have babies...

We have a small herd of mule deer that makes itself at home in our yard from time to time. Last year there were a couple of fawns. This year there are a couple more. Yes, that's a buck keeping watch over them. I'm amazed how often the does take off and let him babysit, but he seems to be good at it.

I also saw one of the stray cats, Gremlin, acting frantic near the front porch yesterday, and meowing in a peculiar way. So I went to investigate. From underneath the wooden porch came the sound of very young kittens crying for mama. So we're back to meows beneath our feet. (I thought I had this area sealed off. I guess I was mistaken.)

By the way, those trunks in the pictures belong to lilacs. Every other place I've lived, it is the custom to remove a quarter to a third of the older shoots every year in lilac bushes, to keep them forever young and bushy. Around here, the custom is to prune off everything but a handful of the oldest branches, and train the lilacs into multi-trunked trees. I don't know how old these are, but they certainly go back decades.

A mystery garden

I finally bought flowers and planted them in the front flower box and flower patch yesterday. It's a small patch out under a lilac tree by the front gate, but a large box - the box is as wide as the living room that sits on the other side of the wall.

The good news is that I only spent $12.87 total on flowers.

The bad news is that the selection was limited this late in the season.

The good news is that there were still some healthy plants left.

The bad news is that some of these didn't have proper stickers. Some of them I don't even know what sort of flowers they are, much less what color the blooms will be. I wound up buying what looked healthy, that looked like it had a sort of leaf that suggested it could survive in semi-sun, and didn't cost too much.

At first, I tried to sort plants by potential height and spread, and color, etc., but I finally gave that up, since I don't have a clue on some of them. In the end, I just jumbled them up any which way and stuck them in the soil, more or less evenly spaced, but staggered, for artistic effect.

I have done this before.

Sometimes it works.

Really.

Not always. Perhaps not even often. But sometimes it works. Really.

Wish me luck. Overnight, bugs took some of the leaves down to veins on one variety. We have deer in the neighborhood now, too. So now it's a waiting game. We'll see what survives, and then we'll see what it is, and then we'll see how well it goes with whatever else happens to survive.

And then we'll see if I need to move anything, to make it workable.

This could be interesting. :)

Honey rolls

Our current favorite roll 'recipe' is loosely based on the following recipe from the back of a Western Family Bread Flour bag. I put 'recipe' in single quotes, because I tend to get a bit free form when I cook, especially when I bake bread. At any rate, I've never made the glaze, I've never tried the heart-shape business, I usually make the rolls smaller than they suggest, I sometimes make crescent rolls, but I sometimes make buns along the lines of hamburger buns, to use to for deli sandwiches.

I almost always substitute whole wheat flour for some of the bread flour (sometimes just a quarter cup, but usually more than that), I never measure the flour (I just keep adding until it feels right), and I don't measure the honey (who likes to scrape away at a measuring scoop or cup that's got honey stuck to it?) and rarely use a whole quarter cup. I don't follow the orders or techniques given, and I usually use what is called the sponge method (you make a batter, and let that rise, stir it down, and then add more flour to make a regular dough - from there you follow the directions for the regular dough). I don't always use 2% milk, either - I've used whole and I've used skim, and everything in between. (Did I mention that I'm pretty free form when I bake bread?)

But, all in all, otherwise I stick pretty close to this recipe. ;)

Well, OK, I also mix brands a lot. But it's their recipe, and I've gotten good results with their products, so, if they want to specify Western Family, who am I to quibble?

Heart Shaped Honey Rolls

Rolls:

1 cup Western Family 2% milk

1/4 cup Western Family honey

2-1/2 tsp Western Family yeast

1/4 cup Western Family butter, melted

2 egg yolks, beaten

4 cups Western Family bread flour

2 tsp Western Family salt

2 Tbsp Western Family granulated sugar

Glaze:

2 Tbsp Western Family honey

1/2 cup Western Family butter, melted

2/3 cup Western Family powdered sugar

1/2 tsp finely chopped lemon peel

Directions:

Warm milk and honey slightly. Add yeast and let stand until foamy. Blend in melted butter and egg yolks. Transfer mixture to large bowl.

Blend together bread flour, salt and sugar; add to yeast mixture. Mix until mixture forms dough. Knead dough until smooth, about 10 minutes. Place dough in a large, oiled bowl and cover. Place bowl in a warm place until dough doubles in size.

Punch down and form into 12 evenly sized balls. Make a 1/2-3/4" cut into center of the ball from one side to make the heart shape. Place on a greased cookie sheet. Cover loosely and rise until doubled in size.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Bake rolls until golden brown, about 15-20 minutes. While rolls are baking prepare glaze. Combine honey, melted butter, powdered sugar and lemon peel. When rolls are removed from oven, liberally brush with glaze. Serve warm.

Makes 12.

I usually don't use a greased cookie sheet, if I have baking parchment paper on hand. It's a luxury, but it makes for better results, and easier clean-up. I usually bake the rolls spaced out in shiny, rectangular cake pans, instead of on cookie sheets, the theory being that maybe they won't overbrown as easily that way. (This is just a guess. But it seems to work. For me.) And we don't necessarily serve them warm; they're just fine at room temperature. I freeze most of them. They thaw wonderfully in the microwave.

These are tasty enough and moist enough I often eat them plain - no butter or anything. They work great with peanut butter. Or ham. And lots of other stuff.

Anyway, for all my experimenting with variations, these days this is the main recipe from which I vary - and early on I did follow it to the letter (except for the glaze, and the cutting to make heart shaped rolls), and the results were very good.

Habitual apologies for unavoidable problems

At the post office today, I was the second person in a two-person line (it's a small town and a small post office). The older-but-not-elderly lady ahead of me was one of those people who clearly has trouble figuring out how things work. She tried valiantly to buy some stamps, but the task was beyond her. She couldn't make herself understood, and she couldn't understand the clerk. Having given it her best shot solo, she dug in her purse and fished out a ruled sheet of paper upon which someone had scrawled in faint pencil what she had been sent to get.

The clerk, bless her, patiently deciphered the message as well as she could (from the effort involved, I don't think the letter writer was a whiz at communications either), and then got a booklet of 20 stamps for her. The clerk then told the customer that it would be 'eight-forty'. This had no visible effect on the customer. So the clerk tried saying 'eight dollars and forty cents'. That worked. I guess abbreviated money talk wasn't in the lady's repertoire. But 'dollars' and 'cents' meant something.

The customer dug in her purse and came out with a twenty dollar bill, which she shoved across, asking, "Is that enough?"

The clerk assured her it was, and also made sure she didn't leave without her change.

Throughout the rather lengthy transaction, the clerk was polite and patient without being patronizing. I would like to note that we have some terrific people working at our post office. They have their ups and downs like the rest of us, but mostly they're terrific.

During the proceedings, every time the customer saw me out of the corner of her eye, she turned to me, mumbling her apologies and telling me she was hurrying. Each time, I assured her I wasn't in any hurry and there was nothing to worry about; that I was fine, that she was fine. But then she would catch me out of the corner of her eye a little later, and turn to me - and even though I wasn't fidgeting, and was smiling, and was perfectly content to wait, she'd apologize all over again. She wasn't skittish or cowering, like some people who apologize a lot, although she was something close to skittish or cowering. She didn't look like an unhappy person overall, but she was unhappy and worried about making me wait.

I tried to move directly behind her so she couldn't see me, but that made it worse, because then she got nervous about me and kept twisting around to see where I was. So I moved back where she could see me and endured her apologies.

I got the feeling that it has become part of her existence to habitually apologize for taking so long; that it has become part of her very being.

I don't like to think how she got that way.

Folks, could we agree that some people need longer than others to figure things out?

Could we agree that it's crazy to ask a person to hurry if he or she can't?

Could we agree that it's probably cruel into the bargain?

As she left she apologized to me again as she was going past, and I reached out and touched her arm and said something along the lines of "It's OK. You didn't cause me any trouble at all." But I'm not sure it registered.

I couldn't help but feel that she has been told too often that she's being bothersome, and so that's what she thinks she is, even when the evidence is to the contrary.

This is not good.

'Postbarbarian' culture

In Barbarians Such as the World Has Never Known?, Anthony Esolen serves up some food for thought. Here's the beginning:

I hesitate to use the word "barbarian" to describe our current state of amnesia -- or, worse, our current pleasure in deriding our civic, intellectual, and spiritual forefathers. That's because barbarians did not do that. The change from nomadic tribesman to citizen does not mark the beginning of chronicles and memorials and feasts to honor the legendary heroes of one's people. What changes is the form of the memorial -- in stone, perhaps, rather than merely in orally bequeathed poetry -- and the reasons for celebrating the virtue; no longer mere courage in the battlefield, but courage shown for the sake of one's country. In other words, there is a fine continuity between celebrating the strength of Achilles and celebrating the bravery of Horatius at the bridge.

So how should we describe this new thing in the world, a people without roots, tumbleweeds that flit and float from fad to fad, attracted by bright toys and flashy sleaze? Postcultural, certainly, but also postbarbarian. The barbarian has not been civilized yet; but what we have now are people who used to be civilized, and that seems to me to be a different thing entirely. Right now I'm poking around in old schoolbooks, readers from the 1800's, for instance. The literary quality of the pieces included in Holmes' Fifth Reader is impressive (selections by Shakespeare, Dickens, Macaulay, Browning, Henry Clay, John Marshall, for example). Even the dated pieces by writers we no longer recognize are not all that bad. What strikes me most powerfully, though, is the assumption by the anthologist that the young reader will be edified, literally "built up," by his encounter with the great writers of England and America. The reader is expected to know, or to want to know, who General Anthony Wayne was, or what John Marshall was like in his personal habits, or how Henry Clay rose from penury and ignorance to his long career of service in the Senate. More than one kind of memory is exercised by these pieces; and it is not true that the students were encouraged never to question the complete wisdom of all those who came before them. That surely was not possible, two decades after the Civil War. Honor is not the same thing as supine submission.

I suggest reading the whole piece.

I also read old books and textbooks, and am continually amazed at the depth and substance of the older books compared to what is generally aimed at youth - or, for that matter, adults - today.

On the other hand, I've mentioned this before and I'll mention it again, the classics section and the history section at our bookstore get regularly depleted, mostly by teens and twenty-somethings who have become convinced (probably correctly) that they're intellectually malnourished and need a dose of something not handed to them in school. Rootlessness might be epidemic, but some of the victims are actively seeking a cure, in other words.

Ours is a store stocked mostly with used books. Try going into a store like that someday, and watching people grab onto books written before they were born, and then clutching them like treasure. Many of today's young folks get every bit as much pleasure in seeking and studying voices from the past as some of the rest of us, believe me. They, too, want to know where they came from, and what's better and what's worse about their cultural environment compared to what's been in place before.

I think C.S. Lewis hit it dead on when he said that every age has its blind spots. What makes us luckier than most folks in history is that we can learn from age upon age, culture upon culture - assuming, of course, that the locally operative 'powers that be' don't erase the past, or skew it out of all recognition and therefore rob it of all benefit as an example of real life, or smash people who go in search of alternatives to the party line, or...

Insert error

In the early '90s, I (naively) accepted a low-budget, state-funded job to write a small local history, something between a booklet and a book.

In this history I included a short passage about a star-crossed missionary couple that came West in 1839.

It was one of those probably-ought-to-be-simple chores that was anything but. On the one hand, I didn't want to plagiarize, but on the other hand I didn't want to introduce new meanings by rewording what little I had to work with. One particularly dicey problem was trying to write up an accident that the wife had. The information I had was that she was seriously hurt when her horse stepped in a badger hole. This may not strike you as a problem as far as retelling goes, but I grew up in horse country, and I was aware that there are several ways of getting hurt in that sort of scenario. Your horse can trip and you can fall off. Your horse can fall and fling you. Your horse can fall on top of you. Your horse can stay upright but panic and ditch you while doing violent maneuvers while out of its head. You can get caught in the stirrup but no longer be in the saddle; at this point the stirrup magically changes from a useful feature to part of an injury factory, the other main components of the disaster workshop being the horse and the landscape. Your horse can trip or jump sideways just so and sling your face into a handy tree limb, with unhappy results. Etc. Etc. Etc.

What I had managed to find in records seemed (one thing with another) to indicate that the horse had fallen. But whether the unfortunate rider got flung, or smashed, or what, was anybody's guess. Not that it mattered, overall, but I didn't want to introduce details that might not be right. I figure that history can get skewed enough without my help.

I didn't have a lot of time to spend on it, but, unfortunately, a small curse seemed to settle on me. No matter which way I went about it, I seemed to be accidentally describing one specific type of crash or another, or one type of injury or another, or I inadvertently placed the accident more specifically along the route than I could justify. Finally, I hit upon "After crossing the Payette River, Mrs. Griffin's horse stepped in a badger hole, and she was badly injured in the ensuing fall."

It wasn't good writing, perhaps, but at least it didn't change history as it had come down to me.

So, finally, I slogged my way through the project and sent it off to the enthusiastic bureaucrat overseeing the project.

When I got the booklet back for review, I found that the friendly bureaucrat's copy edit team had changed "ensuing fall" to "following autumn" - which was off by a season or two, since the Griffins had left the Whitmans and Spauldings in March of 1840, to make their way back to Fort Boise.

That they had started the trip in March was in the same paragraph as the "ensuing fall" business. It should have been obvious, in other words, that I wasn't using 'fall' as a less-academic-sounding version of 'autumn'.

I also thought it should have been evident from the context - horse steps in hole, calamity follows - but obviously I was wrong. I guess I should be glad that March hadn't turned into Two-Step or Double-Time or Journey or something like that. I mean, 'march' has more than one meaning, just like 'fall' does.

Alerted to the horrible possibilities, I read the ms with a fine-tooth comb, and with increasing dismay. The proofreaders had added in railroad lines I hadn't talked about, and otherwise larded the project with factual tidbits I couldn't footnote, and found surprisingly hard to verify.

So I contacted the friendly bureaucrat, and asked him what sources had been used for the additions. I stressed my willingness to change to the new data if it came from a better source than I'd been able to scurry up in the short time between assignment and deadline. The message I got back was that some academic sorts had been asked to proof the text, and they'd put in what they felt like adding. This was fine with me, them being experts and me being nothing but a reporter doing freelance work outside my usual field, but I wanted to check their sources against mine.

I couldn't do it. They'd put in things from memory...

Which, you know, sometimes works.

But since their names weren't on the book and mine was, and since we were on deadline, I put my foot down, and took their pet remembrances out, at least the ones I couldn't back up with written sources at my disposal. At least I hope I got them all out...

I was then (and still am) convinced that a good editor is above rubies. But I am now equally convinced that the editing process can be hazardous to your mental health, not to mention your reputation. Not to mention your ability to tell a story. Not to mention the historical record.

I see that Susan Wise Bauer has been having similar adventures as she watches one of her books move toward printing. Oh, my.

Biker rallying

So, last night at the opening service for the biker ministry that's in town this weekend, we alternated between singing 'praise songs' and listening to testimony. A man in back of me stood up to testify, and he said that he'd ridden a long way to get here, and he was expecting things to happen this weekend, that there was gonna be some spiritual growth going on, and "If we don't save some souls this weekend, I AM GOING TO BE REALLY TICKED."

This from a fellow who could probably pick me off the ground with his pinky finger.

Other times during the service, if he didn't think people were showing the proper spirit, he'd stand up and say so. As in, 'hey, when the guy said he wanted help handing out flyers promoting tomorrow evening's service, I think more people should have offered to help.' Whereupon he named a name or two to get things going. Whereupon a new call was put out for helpers to promote the event during 'free time'. Whereupon more people volunteered than previously...

I don't want to give the wrong impression here. The 'threats' weren't serious in the sense of anybody being in danger from this fellow if they didn't live up to his expectations (hark! do I hear someone muttering something like 'famous last words'? :). And I don' t think he was begrudging the distance he rode (more than a hundred miles). He just had a strong conviction that there are souls around here that need saving that may not understand or respond to prim and proper advances, so to speak, and we really would be failing miserably if we didn't make a proper effort. So he wasn't settling for less than a proper effort. And good for him.

I know that quite a few folks think that Christianity is only for certain types of people, or that it's the province of pantywaists (if you'll pardon my French). This man being living proof that those silly notions are wrong, I'm sure he feels especially strongly about correcting those misconceptions, not to mention helping round up those strays who (having bought into those misconceptions) don't realize how much God and his people would like to welcome them into the Body of Christ, and how much difference it can make.

Mrs. Judson flunks biker etiquette

The church I attend is hosting a three-day motorcycle ministry program aimed primarily at people living in the biker subculture. This is, in case you don't know me, not one of my areas of expertise (/understatement). But the organizers stressed that it was for more than bikers and they'd appreciate nonbikers showing up, so last night I went to the kick-off dinner and service.

At dinner, I sat across from a grey-haired biker riding herd on a bunch of teens. I'd heard that people had converged from various places in the Pacific Northwest for this event, and so I turned to the girl to my immediate right and asked her where she was from. I didn't care where she was from, you understand. It's just standard small talk, a way of getting one's bearings, of searching for common ground, and also of finding out if you're sitting next to a fellow townsman you haven't met yet, or a kid you don't recognize because you haven't seen her in a while, or somebody who has gone to great lengths (literally) to attend. It's always such a safe, not really personal, question to lead with. Right?

Wrong.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The girl flinched and then she cowered, appealing mutely for help from her friends. I sat there utterly clueless as to what I'd done wrong.

The man riding herd on the group got the girl's attention, and said "Hey! Listen to me. When you're in town you live with us, and we live in [name withheld by me for privacy reasons], and that's your home when you're there. It's your home anytime. You're family. You know that, right?"

I don't know which of us was more relieved and grateful for his rescue, the girl or me.

I just wasn't thinking. If I had stopped to think, I like to think it would have occurred to me that a goodly percentage of the people present might not have a particular place to live. Or a place they really come from. Or family. Or that they might have disowned a place or a family. Or that for some of them it might be flat dangerous to name where they come from.

Anyway, I know better now. (And so do you.)