oceancat11

The Cat Came Back

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:22:59 GMT

According to LiveJournal, it has been 31 weeks since I updated an entry. Yeeaaahh. About that. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, that I’ve been meaning to, unless I actually do it. Otherwise I’m all steam and no substance.

Here’s the thing – 31 weeks ago puts us back in... May? Just before Memorial Day? Which is always right about the time the proverbial poo hits the rotating blades at work. And right about the time I begin my steady march to total exhaustion by December. It sounds like bitching, but this year did not seem to have a slow-down midsummer like it usually does, at least not in terms of the amount of work I felt like I had in front of me. Don’t know what it is, but working this year wore me down, and left me very little time for anything else. It’s the whole physically-demanding thing. I feel like a little nub.

But, the silver lining is this: I now have the next two months off from work, and I am feeling it. Yes, I am. I have two free months and I am feeling it good.

But before that, I want to talk about December for a minute.

December began, as it has for the last five years, with The Business of Christmas. We made over 1,200 wreaths in five weeks this year, starting at the beginning of November, and sold almost every one of them. During the week, I run the Wreath Barn, and then on weekends after Thanksgiving, I work on the Christmas tree lot. There’s a little bit of overlap where I am sometimes working seven days a week, and sometimes having to take afternoons off here and there so I don’t fall down. I simultaneously love it and can’t wait for it to be over. I love it because for the most part, people are really happy to get a Christmas tree. There’s always a couple of grumps, but you can’t do anything about them anyway. For everyone else, you get to be a part of making their Christmas season something good, and be a part of The Feeling of Christmas. I mean, this tree is going to stand in their living room for a couple of weeks, and be pretty much a focal point of however they spend their season. You want to make it count. But still, I can’t wait for it to be over, because my wrists and elbows and hips and spine and shoulderblades hurt, and I feel like an old lady when I fall half to sleep on the couch and then have to try to stand up and walk ten paces across the room. I feel all bent and wizened, and wake up every morning with no feeling in my left forearm because a nerve has pinched somewhere around my elbow from the way I hold my arm when I rotate each wreath on the wrap machine. I don’t want to complain -- it goes away after a few days of not working – it’s much better now, four days after Christmas. But while it’s happening, I spend a certain amount of time thinking it would be nice if it would go away. I’ll tell you a secret though: I also love it because it makes me feel tough. I can handle anything wreath-and-tree season throws at me. (Four seasons ago it indirectly landed me in the emergency room for eight hours, and then on the couch for another two weeks, and I’ll have to tell that story another time.) Bring it on.

That being said, I wasn’t too sad when my boss and I determined last Tuesday would be my last day before the break. Little bit of last minute clean-up, only a few trees left on the lot, four days of few cars in the parking lot, and BAM! Another season done. And I think I made the transition into The Celebration of Christmas mode quite nicely. I’d been reading Madeleine L’Engle’s Miracle on 10th Street, and much of my planning for shopping, if not my actual shopping, was done early. What remained, really, was prepping for guests – Christmas Day there would be five of us, and the day after, upwards of 20.

The highlight of the days just before Christmas, undoubtedly, was the arrival of The Table. I have to tell you about this thing, because it is absolutely spectacular. Beth’s Uncle has a tree farm, and in his spare time, does a little furniture-making. He sometimes works with a guy who gets commissioned for pieces, and thanks to some dope who dropped the ball on a project the guy was working on, Uncle ended up with the beautifully turned black birch legs for a Shaker harvest table. From there he built a table base from red maple, and a tabletop from two white pine boards, with purpleheart breadboard ends. Oh yeah, and the table is EIGHT FEET LONG and seats 14. It is phenomenal. It is an instant heirloom. So, Uncle drove the table down on Christmas Eve and put it together in the sunroom. The top is held to the base with these little black birch blocks. Except for the screws in these blocks, the whole table is held together by pegs, also black birch. The tabletop has five coats of poly and three coats of wax and glows golden in the sunlight.

Yes, I know that it is just a Thing. But it is a thing that was built with a perfect combination of hard work and kindness and family love, and it is a thing around which many memories and much laughter will be made by and for a lot of people.

From the arrival of the table onward was just a string of days that make me realize how lucky I am. I may not have a clue what I am doing half the time, and I may do the same things over and over because they are familiar and unfrightening, and I may talk about my dogs and my car and my job so I don’t have to talk about me. But last week I had a letter in the mail from a publisher with some interest in something I wrote. I am going to New Jersey in a few weeks to see some of my own family. It takes me forever to write out my Christmas cards because I have such great friends and family to send them to. I spent my Christmas surrounded by some wonderful people.

It’s good stuff, this December. And a month like that, followed by two months off from work? Yeah, I’m feeling it.

Last Weekend's Project

Mon, 25 May 2009 15:16:59 GMT

The herb garden (foreground) and "dog garden" (aka Colby's Playpen):

A girl and her powerdrill - it's a beautiful thing:

Putting in the final screw:

Colby loving his new digs!:

Weekend Projects & Why I Love My Home

Fri, 08 May 2009 19:47:47 GMT

Two-tiered potting bench and lots of baby plants:

Beauuu-tiful tulips:

More tulips (can never have too many):

Newly-painted shed:

Uber-compost pile (sans compost):

Smiley

Fri, 01 May 2009 17:19:10 GMT

Had the delivery driver for one of our growers, upon seeing me for the first time since last summer say, “Hi smiley!” Ouch.

I’m still working on not having my “serious face” on so much at work, but a lifetime of serious is hard to overcome. I’m definitely a work-is-work/fun-is-fun kind of girl. And I have been reminded more than a few times lately that I can be a little fierce when it comes to trying to get things to run “right.” That being said, the driver totally gets wiseass points from me for calling me on it.

But, it’s my weekend now, and that calls for fun! Of course, some of my ideas of fun might be a little, um, atypical, and tame, but they work for me, and go a long way in keeping me from missing my friends: planting tulips, building a new veggie garden, fixing an old veggie garden, 3 hours designated for short-story editing, organizing the photos on my laptop, playtime with the pups, driving the Mini with the sunroof open to Harbor Freight to shop for tools, being outdoors as much as possible (I am right now as I write this! Woo wireless!), the best-ever chicken cutlet sandwiches for dinner, movie night, and some Woodchuck Pear Cider in the fridge with my name on it.

I will try not to be so fierce on Sunday that I am working and not going to the Bidwell for wings with my friends.

For those who miss NY

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 00:47:23 GMT

http://niemann.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/i-lego-ny/

NC State women's basketball coach Kay Yow dies

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:48:38 GMT

If you'd like to know more about Coach Yow, go here:

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncw/news/story?id=3857041

and here:

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncw/columns/story?columnist=voepel_mechelle&id=3853652

If you'd like to make a donation to the Kay Yow/WBCA Cancer Fund, go here:

http://www.wbca.org/KayYowWBCACancerFund.asp

Yow to miss remainder of season

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:59:32 GMT

Whether you care about sports or not, I'd like you to take a second to take a look at this:

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncw/news/story?id=3813667

and/or this:

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncw/columns/story?columnist=voepel_mechelle&id=3814869

Kay Yow is such an amazing lady - the impact she has on everyone around her is unbelievable. If you watch the ESPN video, the clips they show of the team are from a game last season where rather than wearing their traditional uniforms, NC State wore pink unis, and instead of their own names on the backs of their jerseys, each jersey said, "Yow."

My favorite sentence from either article?: "Yow has handled her long fight against the disease with grace, saying she hoped she could inspire others while also noting that she felt better when she was around her players."

I think everybody needs to know about this lady, whether you care about sports or not.

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:26:32 GMT

Spent Saturday morning visiting the Dale Chihuly glass exhibit at the Rhode Island School of Design, which totally gets points in the actually-doing-something-you-said-you-were-going-to-do category. (I’d say “do-this-year category” but, of course, the exhibit has been at RISD since September and we just got to go to it the day before it’s set to close. On January 3rd. But we still went.) I don’t know enough about glassblowing to put together a cogent explanation of the show’s pros and cons, but I liked it. Many of the pieces reminded me of some fantastic undersea creatures, which I suppose is only fitting as, from what I understand, Chihuly created most of them specifically for the exhibition here in the Ocean State. I do have to say, however, that there were fewer pieces in it, and the colors more subtle, than I expected. It was kind of funny to stand and listen to the various interpretations of the exhibit. Some people may have actually known what they were talking about but for the most part it was hard to take anyone seriously. And then there was the guy we saw while waiting in line to buy our tickets, who showed up at the gallery wearing sweatpants. Not that you need to get dressed up or anything, but when I go out in public to, say, an art exhibit, I prefer to look like I haven’t just rolled out of bed, or come from my job at the transfer station. Only in Rhode Island. That may sound snotty of me, but I am the first person to accept the fact that there are a great many days when what I wear to work (at the farm) should only be worn to work and nowhere else. Although I guess I should just be glad he was AT an art show. Hell, for all I know he could be some artistic genius, in which case who cares what he wears. Maybe I’m just jealous I couldn’t pull that look off....

I think I like glassblowing so much because it’s one of the artistic disciplines that involve so much physical work. Like sculpture, and woodworking, and any sort of metal work, there’s a bit of a wrestling match that goes on between the material and the maker to get the desired result. It’s something I’d love to do if I ever got the realistic chance. Not sure I’d be any good at it, but I’d like to try it.

Some images from the weekend:

Beautiful stuff.

Another high point of the weekend? Going to a party Saturday night for my best friend from college’s dad, who spent 7/12 of 2008 in the hospital or hospital-type places to recover from some pulmonary-cardio-infection thing that had a lot of people stumped for a really long time. It sucked really badly, but because he is one of the most amazing people I know, he has an accompanying network of other really amazing people all over the world who were and are pulling for him, and, well, it worked. If you want some specific reasons to back up my previous post as to why I’m glad 2008 is behind us, you can put his coma at the top of the list. But now he’s home, they’re moving to NC this month (where their other daughter lives) to get away from shitty New England winters, and they’re retiring! It just knocks the cynicism right out of me to see so many people so warmly surrounding one single person, one single family, with so much care.

A Long December, and There’s Reason to Believe…

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:40:26 GMT

Maybe this year will be better than the last. (Yeah, yeah, apologies to the Counting Crows.) I feel obligated to make some sort of New Year’s post – no resolutions or anything like that, but at least some sort of acknowledgement of the change of years and of the promise a new year brings with it, for however short a time.

To be honest, 2008 wasn’t all that bad of a year for me. It was pretty darn good in so many ways. I got a new house, work was hard but ultimately successful, I got a short story published in the Rhode Island Writers’ Circle Anthology. It was, however, hard for a lot of the people around me, in large ways and small, and that always has an effect on me no matter how much I try to avoid it. What was hard on me was the feeling that I had no time for anything, that there was never enough of my time to give to people, that I was always rushing around – mostly to and from work – with just a wave in people’s directions, a quick hey-how-are-ya and maybe a sorry-so-busy, more-time-for-you-soon, but not really getting to give people the time they deserve. If you’re one of the people I’ve done that to, I’d like to try to remedy that. I don’t know how exactly that’s going to happen, but at least now there’s a little space in my brain to figure it out.

I was trying to explain to Beth how it is in my brain these days – it’s like a bunch of telephone lines, and they’re full of birds. Some birds leave, others come in to the space they’ve left. Now that it’s January, the work birds are gone from my brain for a couple months, and that makes room for, say (as was the example I used for Beth, since we were watching a Patriots game at the time), football birds. Or cookie-baking birds. Or story-writing birds. Or getting-involved birds. Or standing-up-for-things birds. Or just being-a-good-friend birds.

When it’s snowy and gray and the silence of winter surrounds, it’s hard to feel that anything is new, but the world is no less fresh than on any other given day. We make our own new beginnings, daily.

I’ve got PLANTS! And then some. (Nerd alert!)

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:51:03 GMT

The women in the perennial department at the garden center where I work are friggin' AWESOME to me. They know I've got a new place to live and a new big yard and tons of garden space (or potential garden space) to play with and they've been giving me all these plants that are destined for the compost pile or don't have tags or probably won't overwinter well in pots. So I've got 36 perennials sitting in my driveway and at the side of the house waiting to be planted. There's asters and astilbe and Asiatic lilies and veronica and lupine and Echinacea and heliopsis and yarrow and statice and turtlehead and IT'S SO EXCITING. I can't wait to play. First order of business: a trip to the Depot for some lumber to frame out four garden beds in the front yard, and possibly one in the back along the pool fence. I wish I had a source for cheaper wood – I'd totally use scrap wood if I had it, but I'm not sure where around here something like that would be available. I've been putting off getting the lumber 'cause it seems like kind of a frivolous expense, but now that I have all these plants (which if I bought would cost me like $350), I have to put together a place for them so they don't go to waste. It's going to be pretty awesome to plant them now and see them come up in the spring.

Veggie Tales

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:25:12 GMT

OK, so my veggie garden this year? ROCKED. Technically, I should say my veggie gardenS, although I have to admit it's hard to tend a garden from 40 miles away. You end up with mutant zucchini. And yellow squash. I'd take pictures for you, but our digital camera got stolen.... But, I digress.

The "garden" here at the new house was kind of half in-ground garden and half plants-in-pots-on-the-patio garden. In the ground were watermelon (this cool heirloom variety called Moon & Stars), cantaloupe, honeydew, and lemon cucumbers (which are little and round and yellow like lemons but taste like the best cucumbers you've ever had). The cantaloupe got overtaken by the other plants and didn't amount to anything, and the honeydew produced one mature fruit that we picked last week and are still eating (yum). The lemon cukes were plentiful and there's still a few out there even though the vines are looking pretty ratty. There was one watermelon picked in August but it ended up not being ripe yet. Currently, there are three large-but-unripe watermelons still on the vine that I am hoping ripen before we get a frost. They look so good I want to pick them NOW.

On the patio in pots were cherry tomatoes, regular cucumbers, green bell peppers, and sweet banana peppers. The tomatoes were awesome - I have no idea how many we ate this summer, but it was a lot. It's the awesomest thing to come home from work and on the way into the house, just stop and pick part of dinner. The plant was so huge we started calling it the tomato tree. And there's still some out there.

The other garden was back at the old house, and it got a little out of control. The zucchinis and yellow squash just grew faster than Beth's mom could pick and eat them, so some of them got to be about a foot and a half long. They're pretty funny. There's one of each still sitting on my counter right now. I had intentions of trying to make chocolate zucchini cake, but we all know I'll never get around to it.

Aside from the squash, that garden grew tons of tomatoes (the Romas were the best - we made bruschetta like it was going out of style!), a couple of eggplant, lots of pickling cucumbers (but sadly, no time to make pickles - luckily they're good in salads, too), and way back in the late spring/early summer, lots of beets (ick), radishes, and cabbage (yay cole slaw!)

At work this year, we sold fresh vegetables - sweet corn, etc. We did really well (and still are - September is harvest time, after all) but everyday we would have at least some sweet corn left over from the day before. So, we all got to bring a lot of it home. To me, sweet corn is this total buy-it-at-a-roadside-stand summer treat, so I feel like it was pretty lucky that we got to have it all summer long. I even froze some so we can bust it out in the middle of winter when we are reeaaally missing August.

Heat, MoCCA, and Pool Chemicals

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:04:17 GMT

The next person who says to me, "Is it hot enough for ya?" is gonna get popped.

For sundry reasons, my tolerance for the hottest of hot days is gone, replaced by the far greater likelihood that if it's over 80 degrees, I am going to overheat and be rendered useless for the rest of the day. If I worked indoors this would probably be less of a problem, but I don't, and as a result I've had to come home early from work two days in a row. It's been 95 degrees, and 115 degrees in the greenhouses. On Sunday I made it until 3, and yesterday, noon. Today? Well, my boss called last night and said I should stay home, since today's supposed to be the hottest day of the heatwave. (Did I mention I have the best boss EVER?) It drives me crazy, though, because I hate being incapable. It's going to be a long summer if this is what's going to happen everytime it gets hot out. So yes, thanks, it is hot enough for me. (Sigh. I'm becoming somebody who talks about the weather.)

However, despite the fact that it was 104 degrees in NYC, I went to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art's annual festival on Saturday (and holy hell, am I glad the historic Puck Building has air conditioning!). My sister, the illustrious norda (http://norda.livejournal.com/) was wont to go, and conveniently Beth and I had both a car and a free Saturday! It was a spur-of-the-moment trip, which often are the best. Being in NYC for the first time in nine months was strangely bracing - I am far from a city girl but the bewilderment I feel in other cities is somehow lessened in NY. Probably because it is the first city I learned how to explore and navigate on my own. (I clearly remember the first time I left my gated college campus to take the subway by myself from the Bronx to spend four hours at the Museum of Natural History. It hit me as I was walking on the sidewalk outside the museum that I had never felt so Grown Up.)

MoCCA itself was great, though seeing so many creative people in one room (or a series of several rooms, I suppose) was a little breathtaking. I did get to see several of my fvorite artists/cartoonists/writers/what-have-you, bought some shtuff, and came home with ideas of new artists (or artists new to me) that I want to check out on the intrawebs. I didn't really talk to anyone aside from the bare basics ("Nice to meet you." and "How much is that t-shirt?") since the shyness-in-the-face-of-talent kicked in, but my sister got to do her rounds and see her peeps. Highlights outside of MoCCA included real NY pizza (don't underestimate it!), McNally Robinson bookstore, and no traffic getting out of town.

And so, one of the cool things about this new house is that there's a pool. It's totally a bonus - a pool was not one of the requirements in house-hunting - and up until three weeks ago we weren't even sure what kind of shape the pool was in. We did have a feeling it was going to be kind of rough, though, since at some point during the winter, maybe even before we moved in, half of the cover fell into the pool and with it a lot of the leaves and muck that the cover was holding. So we decided to hire a pool guy to open it up and do a spring cleaning.

Well. Here's a "Before" picture of the pool three weeks ago:

Since then, the pool guy has removed some of the leaves and added something like 25 gallons of Shock and 20 gallons of chlorine. I'm afraid to stick my hand in to clean out the fliter catch. The water is no longer green and thick, now it is blue and semi-viscous. We can see the bottom in the shallow end now (including a view of the three paving stones that were holding the cover on at one point - who knows how many more fell in the deep end). But let me tell you, with it being 95 degrees this week, having a pool and not being able to use it is just cruel, even if it is a bonus.

(NOTE: Okay, so just this morning Beth and I remembered that there are ceiling fans in the kitchen and sunroom. Duh!)

(Edit: Pool guy just came! Spent a halfhour pulling more leaves off the bottom, says he can't really vacuum until the water is clear and he can see what's down there. Added more chemicals. So still no swimming for a while. Couldn't even hazard a guess. Ergh.)

Did you know...

Fri, 16 May 2008 15:27:39 GMT

...that most limes are actually yellow? The green lime that we all know is the Persian Lime, and it’s not it’s grown for its color and is not the best tasting of the limes. Key Limes are the best. Key Limes you see for sale in stores are green because they’re picked too early and haven’t reached their best flavor.

I know. Fascinating.

Bought a little Meyer Lemon tree last week – kind of a splurge, but I really wanted one. We have one in one of the greenhouses at work that belongs to a co-worker’s mom – it was doing really poorly, so she brought it in to see if we could nurse it back to health. We kind of babied it, and the first year it was there, it produced 2 sad little lemons. Last year, the damn tree (which is all of about 2 feet tall) had 42 lemons on it, and they were AWESOME. Best lemons ever.

So if that one can make it, I have high hopes for my little lemon tree. I also have a little Sumatran Tangerine tree (about a foot tall, if even) that I inherited during one of our big greenhouse clean-outs. It was headed for the compost pile, so I took it home. It had 4 tangerines on it last year, but they were all wicked sour and we couldn’t really eat them. But I figure it has to do better in the new house, what with the giant sunroom and all. I’m not usually a big fan of house plants, but having fruit trees is more like farming. Just indoors.

and then there's this

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:24:53 GMT

Which falls into the category of stuff you just can't make up. I love ths stuff:

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/columns/story?columnist=hays_graham&id=3372631&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab4pos1

do not burn yourself out

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:23:29 GMT

I forget sometimes that some of you read LJ but not myspace, so I forget that if I post stuff over there some of you aren't going to see it. So I wanted to post this paragraph that I found last week while unpacking things. It's a quote by Edward Abbey, whose Desert Solitaire is a book that demands reading.

"Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast... a part time crusader, a half hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourself and your life for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it's still out there. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that sweet lucid air, sit quietly for awhile and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourself, and keep your brain in your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this much: you wil outlive them all."

House

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 01:20:41 GMT

The possibilities in a new house are endless.

This Woman Rocks

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:38:34 GMT

99.999% harder than anyone you'll ever meet:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=ncwexperts

Scroll down to:
Yow: All in how you look at it

A Successful Negotiation

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:31:06 GMT

I am not a negotiator. That's probably one of the first things you could know about me. I have no sense of how to bargain, how to deal. If someone wants to sell me something I want, they tell me a price, and I say "OK!" and hand them the money, because I never learned the art of the haggle.

So when my sister told me, "Congratulations on a successful negotiation!" about the experience I'm about to recount, I thought, "Huh?" It never occurred to me that's what had happened, that's what I was doing. But if it was, I suppose that means I've learned I can barter after all. I guess it just has to be for something that's worth it.

Some of you may recall that a while ago I posted about having a short story of mine included in an anthology that's coming out this year. Well, a few months and revisions later, we finally had a meeting about this, and it did not go well. Points that the editor had brought up that I thought we had come to agreement on were sprung on me again, this time in front of a dozen other people. Another first thing you could know about me is, don't expect me to talk about myself or my writing, especially in front of other people without warning, and do it well. This is why I write – so I don't have to talk. If you want me to do this, give me some small heads-up that it's coming. I am terrible at thinking on my feet.

Unable to articulate why I disagreed with the changes she wanted made, I decided it was best to withdraw the story from the anthology in order to keep in intact. I made the changes I thought would better the story, but I couldn't make the ones I thought would change the story completely into something other than what I intended. This was not an easy conclusion for me to come to, as I nearly always think other people know better than me. I walked out of the meeting and thought done was done, and I was actually okay with the fact that my story would now not be published, because I felt I had stood up for myself and my story – two definite pluses. I was surprised to receive an email from the editor yesterday, saying she would publish it if I just changed one character's name. I found an appropriate substitute for the name I had originally chosen, and all parties now seem content with this. I am stubborn, but I am not unreasonable.

It was good, this standing up for myself and my work. It was also good that it had a pleasant outcome – isn't it good when you work hard for something, and it manages to pay off? I will hopefully have more news for you on the anthology soon.

2008

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:06:45 GMT

Some years I do New Year’s resolutions, some years I don’t. I think I did last year – something about putting myself out in the world more… I don’t remember exactly… at least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I don’t think I’ll have any this year, just a general sense of approaching the world with a better attitude – I think that pretty much encompasses everything I need to improve. And I’ll probably just also make shit up as I go along.

I liked 2007. At least, I was all prepared to have liked 2007, but then I remembered that 2007 brought a lot of crap with it. But also good things. So I could choose to look at 2007 as a year of crap, or as a year of some very good things. Today I’m going with #2. Considering 2007 was the year I found the Ditty Bops, and all the good stuff that goes along with that, I think I’m just going to overlook the crap.

I won’t let it catch me off guard if 2008 turns out to be a lot of crap, too (I know, nice positive way to start a year), but I think what will change will be the way I handle it. I don’t know if that’s technically a resolution, but it could be fashioned into one, with a little work.

I’m actually pretty excited about 2008. I might deny it, but I am. Yesterday started out full of potential – got up and brought my scope to Moonstone Beach to look for birds; saw a short-eared owl and a female harrier over the marsh. Went for a drive to look at new places to live (more on that later), and after that Beth and I were going to have New Year’s dinner with friends in Millbury, MA. So why is it that every time Beth tries to go to MA these days, it snows like the dickens? We called to see if it was snowing hard in Millbury (it was), but we decided to go anyway, then it got worse, so we called for like the fifteenth time to say now we were turning around. So I felt like a giant L since here it was, the first day of a new year, and I was still the one who always calls and cancels plans. Crap. But you know what? I got over it. Maybe 2008 means accepting that sometimes shitty snowstorms cancel plans and it’s OK. And really, it was. So there’s my lame first day of 2008 story, but somehow it just ended up feeling like a fine day, and it’s the only first-day-of-2008 I’ll get.

So far the second day of 2008 has involved getting up at 5:30 a.m. to help Beth pack to leave for the new job in MA, then going back to sleep and getting out of bed at 11:00. And that’s just sweet, because when’s the last time I slept past 8:30? I’m allotting myself one chill day, and then I have to get my ass in gear because I have a lot of writing to do in the next two months.

2007 has been the year of DOING THE RIGHT THING

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:33:55 GMT

I've had a stomachache all week, which has been making me think of two winters ago when I had to spend a week and a half on the couch taking massive amounts of antibiotics because what the doctor thought was appendicitis turned out to be something else completely random (although much preferable because it didn't involve having my appendix out). The week and a half on the couch was, between naps, good thinkin' time, and I remember spending a lot of time pondering what I had done right that year, and what I hadn't quite accomplished. Since that year was a week from being over, I didn't have a whole lot of time to wrap up anything I hadn't quite done, but it did give me time to think about what I could do to make the next year better.

So last night instead of sleeping I was thinking that if I had to spend another week and a half on the couch now, that would still give me two months to do better in 2007. At the beginning of this year I decided a few things that I'd like to try to accomplish. It was kind of about being a better version of myself, so I've thought of 2007 as the year of doing the right thing. For me this has meant:

1) BEING LESS OF AN ASSHOLE. To some people I work with in particular, and to people in general. I think most would agree I still have some work to do here.
2) CARING LESS WHAT PEOPLE THINK OF ME. Yeah, that's still on the docket for 2008.
3) THANKING PEOPLE WHO SHOULD BE THANKED. Especially for inspiration, which is hard to do without looking like a complete sap, but I really feel it should be done anyway.
4) NOT BEING SO, as my friend Rebecca says, "NOT FRIENDLY." Less prickly, less folded arms, less barbed wire and land mines and alligators in the moat. This means being a better friend to the people who are already my friends, and trying a little harder with the new people I meet out in the world.

Making a MySpace page and a page on LiveJournal were part of the experiment that I could be a little better at all of these things this year, and not be so damn scared of people sometimes. Or scared of looking like an idiot. Or whatever it is.

So, the good part is the two months left in the year. November and December aren't really my favorite months, so maybe this'll give me a nice diversion in them, no?

Hayrides, Baby

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 01:51:07 GMT

As much as I may complain about how tired my job leaves me, how it makes me get up late and how by the time I drag my exhausted ass back home it’s dark out and I can’t do much but eat dinner and go to sleep and do it all again in the morning, this really is my favorite month of the year to work there.

I love getting there first thing and driving the payloader out to the field with a bin of pumpkins on the forks, to spread among the rolled-down oats, getting ready for the group of schoolkids to arrive to go for a hayride and learn how pumpkins grow. They’re not city kids, so it shouldn’t really be too far out of their world, but I still love that “Oh!” moment when they realize that little seed in their hand turns into that big Atlantic Giant on the table, with a little help from sun, rain, bumblebees, and Farmer Jack, of course.

That early in the morning, there still might be a little bit of fog left on the fields, and there’s almost certainly some crows hanging around the dead tree at the edge of the woods, standing out black against the gray sky. Once the pumpkins are laid out among the oats it looks just like they grew there, if you didn’t know any better, which the little kids really don’t. Instant pumpkin patch.

I love warming up the tractors, listening to them sputter to life in the cold morning, and letting them run until the chug and rattle of the diesel engine is steady. I love the first hayride of the year, finding out what route my boss has picked this season, plowing through the nine-foot-tall sorghum on a path that’s not quite defined yet, remembering which tractor has the jumpy clutch and which one needs the throttle open wider so it doesn’t stall. I love driving the second tractor of the caravan for big groups, far enough back so the kids in my haywagon feel like their on their own adventure, but close enough that I don’t lose sight of the other wagon among the sorghum, so I know which way the path turns next. I love when we make it out to the pumpkin patch and cut the tractor engines and there’s that half-second of still fall air while the kids peer with wide-eyed wonder over the wagon slats, out across the sea of rolled oats and pumpkins. There’s not a whole lot of wide-eyed wonder left in the world. Then the kids climb down off the wagons and the quiet is broken by laughter and little voices and delighted shrieks, and, with the littlest ones, sometimes a bit of crying if someone’s taken a tumble, or has been reminded by their teacher that they can only take one pumpkin, and not two. Somehow those moments make me forget that I don’t really like kids all that much. Sometimes a flock of wild geese will fly over, or we can hear turkeys calling in the woods – if we’re lucky we’ll glimpse some of the turkey flock on our ride back out. I love that not too long ago I was a city girl, and now, on these days in October, I am The Girl Who Drives The Tractor.

I love when we run the free hayrides for families on the weekends, and the dads ask questions about the tractors, and I can answer them; just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t know anything about tractors. (This feeling is similar to the one at Christmastime when the dads pick out a tree on the lot and realize I am the one who’ll be running the chainsaw to cut it to size.)
I love all the different kinds of pumpkins and gourds and squash that we grow. They have such fun and ridiculous names: Turk’s Turban and Mexican Hat, Red Warty Thing, Autumn Wings, Jack-Be-Little, Pokemon, Hubbard and Cinderella and Fairy Tale. There’s Snake gourds and Penguins and Swans and Birdhouse gourds. Caveman’s Club. Baby Boo and Baby Pam and Ironsides. My favorite is Long Island Cheese.

I don’t even mind the days when all I do is drive the dump truck the seven miles to and from the home farm, bringing loads of mums to sell at the stand. My boss’ 70-year-old aunts, who are twins, have been tending the mums since May, thousands of them, every color you can think of. These same aunts pick all the pumpkins, too, and they invariably make me hope I’m still that mobile when I’m 70. I hop up in the back of the dumper and they hand me up mums and before I know it I’ve got a full load and I’m driving back east, seven miles to unload and turn around and do it all again. But I love it.

(If anyone's interested, this entry is also crossposted to my MySpace page: www.myspace.com/oceancat11. Can you guys believe my MySpace/LJ experiment is almost a year old?)

Good lord, could I be any more remiss in posting to my LJ?

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 19:06:42 GMT

Tomorrow is September 1st. I haven't been in school in 9 years and that thought still conjures a certain amount of dread. Shorter days, chillier nights, plants dying back in the gardens. Swallows gathering to migrate south, and Monarchs, too.

I was supposed to have finished my 4th revision of the novel by tomorrow. Self-imposed deadline, but still. I'm 70 pages away.

Getting ready for a yardsale tomorrow. Unbelievable what stuff still exists in this house, even after 5 yardsales and 3 dumpsters.

So Many Thoughts, So Little Time...

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 13:42:31 GMT

Brrr! It's April 6th and there's ice in the driveway... Here I am waiting patiently for daffodils and spring peepers, and all I get is ice...

So busy, so busy, so busy -- today's my first day off in I don't know how long and I have a list as long as my arm to fill it with. Writing is somewhere on the list but it'll probably get bumped down to the bottom, somewhere between cleaning the basement and balancing my checkbook. Oh, my life is just full of the mundane...

The Windy City and Back Again

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:32:12 GMT

For the last week and a half I've been out in Chicago visiting one of my sisters and her kids... I drove out, so I really was only actually in Chicago for five days, and the rest was driving time... I'm still not ready to get on an airplane, and the drive was good because I do some of my best writing when I'm in motion. A few new poems were born along the way.

Chicago's not a city I've spent a lot of time in, but I feel like this trip I got a much better sense of where everything is. It helps that we all did a lot of things, not just hanging around the house (my three neices are all teenagers and are busy-busy-busy all the live-long day). So I got to see quite a bit of downtown, between taking Mary to an appointment and going to Eileen's basketball game and taking in a Providence-DePaul women's basketball game with the whole family. I also spent an afternoon with my friend Sarah who lives right near UChicago. The campus is beautiful, and we visited the coolest bookstore ever. I was very good and only bought two books -- House of Light by Mary Oliver for me and Left Out in the Rain by Gary Snyder for Beth.

Both on the way out and the way back I stopped overnight in Hermitage, PA. There's so many little towns out there, all of them full of stories, and I'm itching to go out and see them all.

More Bops

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:32:24 GMT

And by the way, I'm not going to be burning copies of The Ditty Bops' CDs for anyone -- I'm making them go to the website (www.thedittybops.com) and buy their own, so The Ditty Bops will be able to keep making music forever!