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Archive for March, 2016

An Easter Tale

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 27, 2016| Leave a Comment »

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Many, many years ago, we were upstanding members of an up-and-coming megachurch in the Portland metro area. Pillars, I believe the word was. Mostly, we were the lackeys who did the work while others got the glory, but that’s OK. If we hadn’t been the lackeys, I would not have this story to tell.

Pastor came to me and asked if I could find a lamb for Easter Service. A living, breathing lamb. I guess he thought I could create a miracle and find someone who would loan me some poor lamb, separated from it’s mama for 48 hours, just so he could create a visual explanation of Jesus as the Lamb of God.

I knew – because I grew up in sheep country – that lambs were already a few months old. We’d be lucky to find a small one. I also had a source, and I called him up. He made arrangements with his aunt, and I was soon in custody of a pure white, very frightened, and un-weaned lamb. I had a bottle, formula, and nowhere to keep the critter.

We lived in a singlewide trailer and we stuck said lamb into the bathroom to keep it away from the dog, cat, and to contain all the little pellets in one space. The lamb cried all night. It got diarrhea. It wouldn’t take the bottle.

We got the lamb to church, but it was hardly pristine. I hid it in the dressing room for the baptisms, and I gave it a much-needed shower. It still had diarrhea and it was still refusing the bottle.

Pastor wore a white shirt. His wife came to me and told me to make sure the lamb was clean because we didn’t want any thing to soil Pastor’s shirt. I thought… “Seriously?”

Somehow, that lamb managed to make it’s debut in front of a crowd of 5,000 without shitting. It stayed calm in the pastor’s arms and only bleated a couple of times. It’s five minutes of glory were over and it pooped all over the shower. I scoured, cleaned, and loaded the poor thing up in my car, and beat it back to where it came from post-haste.

No happier lamb has ever been known than that one when it saw it’s mama and real food.

In retrospect, I think I should have told the pastor that I couldn’t find a lamb, and just accept the blame. Oh, but NOOOOO – we had to be good little servants. I consider having to clean the church shower and my own bathroom as penance.

I don’t attend that church anymore. Actually, it doesn’t exist anymore as the pastor packed up and moved on to a bigger and better location. God bless him.

Lessons learned? I’m not a good substitute for a ewe, but I can calm a frightened lamb. Lambs can shit a lot. Lambs are sweet.

And never, ever, confess to a lamb that you love chorizos and gyros. My lamb went home ignorant of my Other Side.

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Grocery Stores, the HSP, and the Introvert

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 21, 2016| 2 Comments »

I haven’t blogged about being an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person – take the test here) in a long time. I’ve been in a good place with no triggers for over a year, and that’s the way I like life to move. I like my job, I love the slow pace of small town living, I enjoy the lack of commute and stress. My routine is simple.

My routine is about to change. And I am not happy.

The grocery store where I do the bulk of my shopping is being closed. I like this store for a number of reasons: local beef, local milk in a glass jar, wide aisles, friendly staff who know me by my name, a pharmacist who really watched my back, wide (and clean) aisles, and a significant lack of fighting to get to food items on shelves. When this store goes out of business, I will be reduced to three local options (not including Grocery Outlet which sells things past their pull date & where you can never be certain of what is going to be on the shelves. Great prices, just no consistency): two big name grocers owned by the same corporation who purchase their beef from Iowa (which is OK, if you live in the Midwest and like grain-fattened beef – I don’t, on either count), and one big name grocer/retailer/warehouse style store.

Beef – we live in the heart of ranching country, for Heaven’s sake! Why would I buy something not grown within the State of Oregon and grass fed? I grew up on grass fed beef and have no desire to change. I used to shop at Albertson’s, but I never bought my meat there – I purchased it from a local grocer who bought 4-H beef from the kids in the county. In the years since, Albertson’s has changed management and ownership, and the local grocer went out of business. Safeway moved in, and Safeway is owned by Albertson’s.

I don’t like our local Safeway parking lot. This can be huge. I get that developers have to follow certain “rules” for “green spaces”, but the design for parking in this lot is all about concrete dividers and awkward angles. I even quit buying gas there because the last guy who pumped gas for me (hey, I live in Oregon, OK?) told me I had to get out of the car to pay.  I’m sorry – if I am not getting out of the car to pump my own gas (which I am not, in Oregon), why would I get out of my car to pay for the gas? Defeats the purpose of having someone pump my gas for me. Petty, but that’s how it is.

The third option – a Kroger/Fred Meyer – has followed the “warehouse” style of building and just going through the doors is a sensory overload. They do have local produce and beef, their prices are a little high (but so are the other options, locally), but they have great “loss leaders” (ads that draw you in and they lose money on). It’s just getting me through the doors that has my stomach in knots. It’s crowded. Narrow aisles. You have to jockey to get to things. Lines are long. I don’t mind shopping the other departments at Fred’s, but the grocery area is a nightmare of sensory overload for me.

There are options further out, and my extrovert friends are probably wondering why I don’t utilize them: WinCo, which is just over 5 miles from home and offers the following: narrow aisles, too many people, self-serve bagging. The pluses are: lower prices. In my book, the negatives just won. Oh, and I’d have to negotiate up Old Highway 99 with all the stoplights and traffic. And bag my own groceries. Did I mention I find that to be a pain in the behind? Bagging my own groceries. I consider that worse than having to pump my own gas! (Note: I live in Oregon. One of two states in the Union where we can actually pay someone else to stand out in the rain to pump our gas for us. I really hate it when I have to drive to Nevada and have to pump my own gas through California and Nevada. Can’t we just pay some poor schmuck to do that? I used to do that. it was a great entry level job.)

Costco. Warehouse. Thousands of people. Big carts. Warehouse. Great bulk prices. Warehouse. Sensory overload. No.

Super Walmart. Just.No.

Trader Joe’s. Darn – too far away to be feasible. Closest one is 13 miles away.

We have a Market of Choice within my preferred driving distance, but – and I mean a huge BUT – their prices are extremely high. Local meats, organic, great selection. Terrible parking (see Safeway). HIGH prices. Close to the Backyard Bird Shop where I purchase birding supplies. High prices nil all the benefits.

I’ll probably suck it up and go to Fred Meyer, but that presents another problem: Fred’s isn’t just a grocery store. They sell everything you need, like Walmart, only better quality. Or Target, only better quality. Clothes, furniture, paint, gardening, arts, toys, home, electronics. You see the problem? $$$$$ Because I can stand to be in those departments. It’s the grocery area where I get overwhelmed by the people, the carts, the lights, and the narrow aisles.

I think – and I may be wrong – for the non HSP, that none of this would be overwhelming. Just make a change. For me, it’s almost a life or death question. My routine is disrupted (Haggen, BiMart, home). I can change to buying a lot more at BiMart, but they are not a super store – they’re just a “general store” with a few items of everything that are nearly always cheaper than competitors: dry goods, electronics, paint, hardware, beer/wine, dog food, rifles & ammo, toys, home goods.

There are some products that our local Haggen sells that no one else carries: there are two local dairies who sell milk in glass bottles, pasteurized, but not homogenized (i.e. there’s still a layer of cream at the top of the bottle). It’s really good milk. I don’t drink much milk, but when I do, taste is everything. I grew up in a community with a local dairy and that mega-store produced milk tastes “off” to me. My husband loves the bottled milk. And they make the BEST chocolate milk, ever (must be chocolate cows).

I’ve been commiserating with co-workers. We all agree this is a tragedy. We’re scrambling to move our prescriptions. Some of us are agreeing that the only reason we shopped at this Haggen is that it’s never very crowded. We also agree that Fred Meyer is “sensory overload”. We’ll pay the couple pennies extra for groceries for the peace of shopping in a store that rarely has long lines, always has wide aisles, and where we know the employees by first name (and they know us).

We all wonder what will come in to replace the store: surely not WalMart? Our city council has a history of rejecting WalMart, but they also have a history of rejecting anything progressive. Maybe Trader Joe’s? Store is too big, but – Trader Joe’s has a location in Beaverton that is large & urban. TJ’s is kind of a specialty store and not always cheap. They’re the top choice. Whole Foods? Expensive, but I could price compare with Market of Choice…

Just not WalMart. Their practices of pushing out local businesses (like my beloved BiMart) are epic.

I get that this is not a crisis to the “normal” or “average” person. But to me: introvert, HSP… This is a crisis. Forgive me for curling up into a fetal position and asking God to “let it pass over”. I may even daub my door posts with lamb’s blood (oh, get over it. Sacrilegious jokes are a part of my childhood. My bff was Catholic & I was Protestant. Guess what our fathers told us to say at the other’s dinner table? Yeah. Some church joke). (And don’t ask about the whiskey jokes…)

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The Love of Books

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 13, 2016| Leave a Comment »

013I am on a “de-clutter, deep-clean, get control of my life” kick. So far, I’ve powered through the laundry room, the bathroom, the kitchen and dining rooms. I purchased a shelf for our antique bottles, but I have not yet installed it. I got side-tracked with the upstairs.

I need to get the upstairs whipped into shape before warm weather comes, because we don’t have air conditioning and it can get a mite bit stuffy up there, despite the window fans.

My first attack was the area where the majority of our books are stored – some of which have not been touched in the 12 years that we have lived here, except for a cursory dusting. The books were on the shelves in the same order they were placed when we moved in, which may or may not have been entirely logical.

I decided that I needed to consult the Dewey Decimal System and get some sort of organization done, as well as moving the shelves out a bit and lining both sides of the area with book shelves (vintage crates, for the most part). That way, I could also get the antique pump out of the way of the shelving and on display as it rightly should be.

024The pump weighs a couple hundred pounds or so. It used to sit in the alley behind one of our first rentals, an old dredge pump that someone once offered us money for, but we decided we wanted to use it as a (very heavy) coffee table. Don added the stand and the table top. It no longer matched our living room area (which is tiny, like the rest of this house), so it was relegated to a corner in the loft, in front of the books.

This project has taken me just over a week. I pulled out books and book shelves, dusted, swept, mopped. I found no silverfish, which surprised me because I know we have them, and I thought if they would hide anywhere, it would be in the books. I found some spider evidence, but not really much of that, either. But to be safe, I dusted the edge of the walls where they meet the softwoods with a light powdering of diatomaceous earth.

Then I printed off an abbreviated Dewey Decimal System, because the majority of our books are not fiction, but are within .099 and 970.0 in the library catalog.

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I piled the books in loose piles according to their category. I didn’t move the fiction or the vintage books (although I confess some of Don’s vintage books got filed in with their modern counterparts. My vintage collection stayed together). Yes, we have a his and hers vintage book collection. The fiction is entirely mine.

Then I began shelving, pausing often to retrace my steps and add books where I missed them (where does taxidermy fit in? Oh, after dinosaurs. How odd that we have only one book on dinosaurs). The majority of our books fall into:

598 – birds

635 – gardening, indoor & outdoor

900 – history

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I’m not entirely happy with it as I had to move my vintage books around a bit to fit. (see the pump in the corner back there?)

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The vintage and a mix of fiction complete these crates. History, biographies, and Native American culture round it out.

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The majority of my fiction is here, in the narrow space by the studio door. I really don’t know what to do with the vintage Pepsi crates (at this point in time).

My hands hurt (arthritis). Surprisingly, I didn’t tweak my back. Surprisingly, I’m done. Well, mostly. There’s a whole other side of the loft to do & a question of where to put the file cabinet blocking the shelves at one end of the loft. But I didn’t take a photo of that.

I won’t label the shelves with the Dewey Decimal System, either. I still need to go back and file alphabetically by last name of the author, but – hey, we’ve lived without it being that organized for more than a couple decades. As long as we know the general area to find a book, we’re good.

Right?

 

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Easter Egg Tree

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on March 7, 2016| Leave a Comment »

First off, I was mildly surprised that my post last night about my sewing machine generated considerable traffic and several “likes” from other bloggers who happen to love sewing (I wonder if they actually read my blog because I don’t actually “love” sewing – and none of them commented). I checked out their profiles and am even following one because she didn’t seem to be selling anything, and she had a readable blog.

So, tonight’s post is brought to you by my maternal grandmother and Pinterest™. I actually have a Pinterest page. I don’t do a lot over there, but I am beginning to learn the ropes – and this post is brought to you courtesy of some great ideas I found there (posted on my Easter Ideas board).

Grandma always had an Easter Egg tree. I’m pretty certain my mother did, too, but for whatever reason, I associate the Easter Egg tree with Grandma. I only spent one Easter with Grandma, and that was when I was 18.

I have gone through several variations on the theme, and with little success. For a very long time, I had real egg shells (devoid of the insides, of course), painted and all, that I hung on whatever passed for the Easter Egg tree that year. After 30 years of hauling those eggs around, I finally tossed them last year. I still have the one goose egg, but the rest are either store bought or (more likely) yard sale purchased. I bought a nice wire display for the majority of the heavy ceramic eggs (estate sale), but the light weight hanging stuff…

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See, I am almost as bad about Easter as I am Christmas: I *love* the celebration and I *need* to decorate. The problem with this is, decorating for Easter hasn’t really caught on within the money-spending Christian community. The bunnies, chickies, and eggs are rather “taboo” still (unlike the pagan symbols of Christmas).

So I have quietly amassed my collection of lambs, bunnies, eggs, and even a goose (green ceramic thing, bottom left of the above photo). I even managed to find a Christian symbol somewhere – the white ceramic cross in the back, by the lovely crochet gazebo. (Machine crochet, I got it at K-Mart, which is also where I got the cross). I love my ceramic bunnies. The swing set was a yard sale find.

Easter conjures up memories of my ultra-tiny mother in a new (and fashionable dress, usually along the lines of Jackie Kennedy) and all of us kids in Easter finery. Dad hid. The rest of us went to services at the Methodist Church where we kids got to sit in the main service and Mom kept us silent by feeding us wintergreen flavored Certs™ breath mints. We sang lovely hymns like “Little Brown Church in the Vale” and we girls got to wear little white hats and patent leather shoes that hurt our feet. We felt like princesses.

After church, and after we all shook the reverend’s hand and gushed over his wonderful sermon, and after Mom tired of greeting all the E&C people (Easter & Christmas), we loaded up into the station wagon and returned home. We kids got to tear into our baskets and fall into sugar comas at that point, while Mom prepared an Easter ham that I would refuse to eat. (I love ham now, but back then, I hated it. The only plus to ham was that we could have scalloped potatoes later in the week.)

All that to say: I found a pattern for an Easter Egg tree that I wanted to try this year. And I’m very happy with the results.

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White on white isn’t the best photography option. I cut branches from the flowering plum that leans over into our yard (most of it is in our yard). I wrapped those branches in a mix of ribbon and yarn. I secured the branches in a funky milk-glass finger vase with marbles for ballast. I hung all the ornaments, including the ones my daughter sent me at Christmas.

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The little half-egg wooden pieces in the shape of eggs. They are so cool. There are nine of them.

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Here’s the whole display: ceramic “rescue” bunnies at the bottom, cool vintage wire basket with silk flowers, awesome plant stand I picked up at Goodwill for $2, and the Easter Egg tree (held up with one of my faerie houses).

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When I got the big bunnies out, Murphy thought they were living animals. Harvey was pretty fascinated, too, but one sniff dispelled any fantasies for him. Murphy actually tried to eat the bunny on the right.

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Faerie house in the middle – long story – but that’s Dill, the Brownie, captured in his treasure hoard. Glass plate on top keeps him from escaping.

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The dogs can’t get near it.

(Brought to you by mother’s favorite quartet, The Statler Brothers. You are welcome)

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To Sew or Not to Sew

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on March 6, 2016| Leave a Comment »

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My mother loved to sew. She could make her own patterns. She made beautiful clothes.

I have at least three cousins who quilt. My mother-in-law sews. Both of my girls love to sew.

Me? I can sew and I have quilted. All on this lovely Singer Featherweight that I begged and pleaded for. My mother gave it to me when I left home and she bought her brand new White. My brother got the machine Mom used between the days of this machine and the White.

My Featherweight is in prime condition, has a complete button hole kit, the original manual, and a mostly intact original case (it’s missing one latch). You can purchase your own for between $400 and $600 (mine is not for sale).

For decades, this machine has been adequate for my sewing needs: a repair here and there, a simple project like a banner, a couple of quilts, a number of Christmas stockings for my nieces and nephews. I’ve put up with it’s persnickety habit of eating the bobbin thread (I think it is currently jammed). It’s been well kept. Well loved.

We moved into this house 12 years ago, and that’s about the last time I used this machine. No room, for one thing. It’s a pain to set up on the kitchen table and have to work around the project. Then, it ate the bobbin thread, again. And I moved on to other projects. Bought other machines that my girls ended up with because they liked sewing more than I do. I’ve been without a second sewing machine for around 6 years now.

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Until this past week, when I finally picked out my Christmas present from my husband. I was going to purchase the one that is a step above this one, but the store was out of that model, and – really – I don’t need anything fancier than this. This does more that the Featherweight and I’ve decades of sewing on that!

(On a side note: the water color on the wall came from my Grandmother’s estate. I painted it for her in the early years of my marriage, a gift for Grandmother’s Day.)

I spent the better part of this weekend deciding where I wanted to set up a sewing station and getting motivated to do the work necessary to create that area. I have too much junk. My first sewing project will be to sew a dust cover for it (and, yes, I know how to do that, even without the DIY instructions off the Interwebs. It’s the kind of sewing I excel at: making up my own ideas).

Second project: new curtains for the 1971 VW Van.

Third project: long skirt for Ren Faire dressup. I’ll need to actually purchase a pattern for that. And all the notions.

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For a little perspective: the Featherweight set up in front of the new Singer. The new Singer – all plastic – weighs about the same as the Featherweight, and has a carry handle for convenience, so it’s a win-win situation.

I actually look forward to sewing.

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Every Year Grief Looks Different

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on March 2, 2016| 4 Comments »

Damn. I looked over at the calendar. Today is March 2nd. Sixteen years ago, my father called me, almost in a panic. He didn’t know what was happening, but my sister was critically ill. She was so ill, in fact, that she was in a coma and on a helicopter to Reno from Ely, Nevada. She could have gone to Las Vegas or Salt Lake City – it’s all about equi-distant from Ely: a good 5-hour drive. But my family has always gravitated to Reno.

I remember how numb I was when Dad called again on the 3rd. She didn’t make it. My little sister, the one person I had a profound love/hate relationship, was gone. The one who once bit me over who got the blankets in our shared bed (she had them all and I just wanted my share, but she rolled over and bit me). The girl who purposely mimicked my clothing choices throughout my high school years (and her junior high years), often bringing out the worst in me because I couldn’t see imitation as a sincere form of flattery. The girl who drank her way through her Freshman year in high school, often stumbling home in the wee hours of the night – she was gone.

Since her death, I have been overwhelmed by the number of kids we grew up with who have messaged me and told me how much they loved her. Her laugh. Her ability to tell a joke. Her very dry sense of irony. Her one-liners. Her way of living life for the moment. Her fierce and loyal friendship.

I held her hand from a distance when she had to give up her first born to adoption. I still have all the poems she wrote about that dark time in her life, how she didn’t want to let the baby go. We cried over the phone together.

I sensed, much later in life, that her words to me were often staged: the words of a little girl who just wanted her older sister to love her and be proud of her, unconditionally. She’d detail house plans, redecorating schemes, art projects. She wanted me to love her.

I did love her, but not. How does an older sister put that into words. I was the “good” child, the do-gooder, the A+ student, the never-does-anything-wrong kid. The unintentional suck-up. Truth was, I don’t have a daring bone in my psyche. Risk of physical pain? I’ll take the easy way out. My sister (and my brother) would face the pain head-on. I am the unabashed introvert. Brother and sister: extroverts. I am the one that takes everything into some deep place and over-analyzes. I am the clumsy one.

I remember some girls picking on my sister. I no longer remember the circumstances, just that they were to the point of physical bullying. It so happened that my best friend and I happened upon a scene of them bullying my little sister. They were big girls, much bigger than me. But that was MY little sister, goddammit, and *I* was the ONLY person allowed to give her a hard time. I’d recently found my voice in life, and I used it that day, at the mouth of an alley way, to lay into three girls who had no business being bullies. me, all 70-pounds of petite, chasing bullies with her words.

Words became my weapon. My sister learned to break beer bottles over people’s heads. Not exactly a technique I would ever be good at, but she excelled at.

Damn.

The thing is, her youngest kid is graduating from high school this year. She has no memory of her mother. A few photos. A strong resemblance to me. No idea of the teenager her mother was. Huh. Her mom was a teenager until my mother died. Deni decided then that she needed to grow up. She was probably about 23 emotionally when she died. She was chronologically 40 years old and starting to look older than I am now. Life’s a bitch.

Grief comes with layers. You grieve for the lost relationship, for the things you didn’t get to say or do, for the love of the person. When anniversaries come, I grieve for the loss of my family: Mom, Sister, Dad. There’s just the two of us left now, and all of our children (my brother’s, mine, and my sister’s). I miss the laughter. The hugs. The covert whispers after dark. The secrets we promised to never tell. The looks that passed between us. The feel of her hair in my fingers as I braided it for the last time in 1998, standing in Dad’s kitchen as he and my daughter went through a box of mementos on the sun porch.

Dad’s 70th birthday. The last time I held my sister in my hands. She had headaches, she said. I told her to try braiding her hair differently: two braids instead of one heavy one down her back. I proceeded to part her hair and braid it for her.

Sisters have complicated relationships. I desperately wanted to work through ours. I wanted to figure out where and how I’d hurt her. I knew she’d forgive me: that’s what she always did. I wasn’t ready to forgive myself. Oldest sister. The bitch. Me. It doesn’t matter now. She’s gone.

And she’s come back from the dead to let me know she forgave me long, long ago. I still see her as about 10 years old.

004The girl I see in my visions.

001Playing dress up in the basement

003“How much can I torture Jaci’s cat?”

002Always styling.

I love you and miss you, Mary Denise.

Denny.

Deni.

 

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