More Catching Up

We had a lovely, lovely sunny fall weekend - a bit cool, but not imposibly so.  The YD went canoeing on the Petawawa River and had, according to her, a lovely time.  Brrr.  It is 8 C out there this morning.  She did not take the large white dog, figuring it would be too cold for her.  Her father rolled his eyes at this, but I didn't - the LWD will wade into water at the slightest provocation and getting her coat soaked at these temperatures would not be good for her if you couldn't dry her off.  Ah, the joys of pet ownership.


At any rate, we had this glorious sun and I decided to play with shooting directly into it.  Probably not good for my camera sensors, but I wanted to try.  I also wanted to capture the oak on the front lawn as it was looking very nice decked out in deep red and rust.

071/365  -- notice how cleverly I have hidden the satellite dish behind the trunk.

 072/365.  Dramatic, in a strange way.

I was also up early one day this weekend and as we are still on Daylight Saving time, I got to see the sunrise.  It was very cool and still and damp - there was not a bird chirp or rustle of leaves.

073/365.  What I saw first - and took without the flash on the camera, being somewhat dopey and not outside of my first coffee.

 074/365 A few minutes later, with flash. I can't decide whether the colour did intensify or using the flash changed the sensor reception.

I'm still playing around with the oxymoron prompt.  Can't leave this kind of thing alone.  I looked at my office desk the other day and one of my mother's expressions surfaced in my mind -- "A fine mess you've made of it!' she used to say.

075/365

I have tidied all the mess into one pile this morning, as my cleaner is here and I don't like to watch strong women weep.  But I will have to disentangle it later and Do Somthing with most of it.  Maybe a bonfire would be a good option.  Maybe not, though.  There is, I think, a cheque lurking in there somewhere.  No better incentive to file than finding money while you do it.

076/365.  If only this fellow were a bit bigger and more, um, animated.

How I wrecked my daughter's refrigerator and other stories from the trenches.

I am living at the elder daughter's house this week, looking after Little Stuff while the ED and spouse are at a conference.  This should be quite an easy task as Little Stuff is now almost seven and can look after a lot of things herself.  Grama's tasks include putting together a huge lunch including three snacks and a main noon meal, finding something a starving kid wants to eat for supper, delivering her to school, picking her up from daycare, listening to and helping with homework, and keeping the menagerie fed.

It is this last task that was the undoing of the refrigerator.  This house resembles a small zoo.  There are lizards, snakes, fish, a tortoise the size of a punch bowl, a quite demented cat (of whom more later) and Charlotte Ann, the guinea pig. She lives in Little Stuff's bedroom in a well appointed cage and gets fresh veggies twice a day to supplement her kibble (or whatever - dried guinea pig ration, I guess).  On the first evening, Little Stuff opened the frig to get out some greens and ripped the front panel off the crisper.  Oops.

Well, Grama decided that fixing this ought to involve disassembling the three drawer pile and cleaning it all up, then putting the front panel back on and reassembling.  All went well for the first two steps as I carefully took out all the food, took the parts out and set them in order and cleaned.  The last step was a big disaster.  I could not get the pile reassembled in a way that allowed the door to shut.  I tried over and over.  Meanwhile the food in and out of the frig was getting warmer and warmer and so was I.  I needed help.

Now the ED is without doubt the most organized person I have ever known, even more so than my mother whom she resembles a lot, and so I knew that the manual for the refrigerator would be stowed somewhere logical.  I am not logical, I guess, because I could not find the dern thing.  I found labelled and dated photo albums, art supplies, correspondence supplies, camera manuals, a neatly stowed drawer of scissors and other necessary bits and pieces, an alphabetized disc collection, with notes and dates, a stash of cards and other games, financial correspondence, all neatly stowed and handy.  No frig manual.

Food still getting warmer.

Finally, in desperation, I stacked all the bins back into the frig, with the food in them, piled one on top of the other.  And the door shut.  Daughter and spouse return home tonight and will, alas, be greeted by an almost unusable refrigerator.  I have stacked the beer and diet pop in the front where they can get it easily.  Logic tells me this mess will seem less annoying after a nice cold brew.

As for the cat, she decided last night to abandon Little Stuff and sleep with me, having fallen in love with my dressing gown as a cat bed.  At approximately 1:00 am she jumped up onto my bed with a resounding thump.  Startled out of a sound sleep I flailed out with both arms and sent the poor kitty flying off the bed and onto the floor.  And then she disappeared.  I was afraid I had hurt her and so I got up and searched for her to see if she was intact.  Cat was no where to be found.  This morning she reappeared, her usual sinuous self, and when she saw me she arched her back and hissed.  I am persona non grata in cat land.

And here I thought I was going to have a fine, easy time.

Grumpy Seasonal Thoughts.

As of this morning, the progress I have made clearing my office looks like this. It's not as awful as it looks because the big cardboard box is full of discarded duplicate minutes and other useless bumf. And the row of gift bags will disappear on Tuesday. But the pile of Christmas cards that need to be written is a tad depressing.
I have made up a new category of Christmas pain-in-the-posteriors. Have you ever met a Grunch? This is a person, usually one of your near and dear ones, who asks you what you want for Christmas and, when you tell him, explains to you why this is not a good choice and goes and gets you something else. Possibly something similar. Possibly something that will be Good For You to have.
I have two Christmas parties to attend this week. Both held by organizations of which my husband is a member. At each of these parties the wives will foregather in one location and the husbands in another and talk shop. I am considering coming down with something contagious.
And Merry Shopping Week to you, too.

Escaping the Job Jar

I have just spent an exhillarating half hour crawling around on the floor of my office, lying on my back under the bench where my scanner and printers live, tracking phone wire around through holes in the desktop and unwinding cords. Three fine results of this activity are; the floor has been dusted, mostly with my hair, I have jacked in a new phone to replace the unit that died and I have rationalized the cord snarl a little bit. I do have one cord that does not attach to anything and I have not got a clue what it is for. Sigh.

Down in the laundry room is a pile of trousers, his and hers, that require either shortening or rehemming. Also four big tablecloths that need ironing, a drawer full of stuff that needs mending, some of which has been there since this time last year, and a couple of painting projects. I need to vacuum, clean a bathroom and a kitchen, scrub squashed flies off the kitchen window. I have been planning to do a post on books I love for days and the pile is sitting beside the computer now.

However, I have one flower bed left to rake and mulch. There is blue sky out there and the temperature is mild for mid November. I have done some housework, after all, haven't I? Where are my gloves and knee pads?

Escaping! Now!

Back soon.

Monday Mission

Thanks to the wonderful blog citizen Painted Maypole for setting up these missions. She rocks!

Kitchen Exercise Routine

Next in our Harried Housewife series of exercise routines, we come to those that can safely and easily be performed in the kitchen in the course of the daily schedule. Simple and effective, they provide opportunities for toning, stretching and manual dexterity, can be done in sets or alone, and have all been tested by our resident expert, Mary G.



1.) The Salad Bowl Stretch

Standing on your tiptoes, extend the arm and each as high as you can over your head, hook the edge of the bowl with your right forefinger and pull sharply. As the bowl falls toward you, grasp it with your left hand and lower it gently to the counter. If more than one bowl is needed, change to a left, right combination. Do not let the bowl strike you on the forehead or forearm and remember to keep your spine straight. If you cannot reach the bowl with your hand, a set of kitchen tongs may be employed to extend your reach. Try not to scratch the bowl.


2.) The Freezer Stuff

Bending at the waist and keeping the knees flexed, grasp the item you need with your right hand, using the left to keep the other items on the shelf from falling out. The forearm may also be employed if more than one item starts to fall. For items on the top shelves, exercise caution to prevent being struck in the chest by frozen fish or ice cube trays. Now squat, keeping the back straight and pick up the items you failed to catch. Bend again at the waist and stuff each item back into the shelf. Close door. Repeat as many times as necessary to find what you need to cook.


3.) The Drawer Pull.

Stand bent slightly at the waist and use your right hand to pull out the drawer. As in the exercise above, use the left hand to keep the contents of the drawer from falling to the floor. Again, descend to a squat and pick up the items you failed to catch. Remember to let go of the drawer before you do this, or you may pull entire drawer out onto your head. Be especially careful of the screw driver and pliers as you catch; they are sharp and heavy. An exercise involving filling in cuts in the vinyl flooring is to be found in Appendix A, under Advanced Techniques.

4.) The Floor Swab

Review this exercise from Chapter 2, Bathroom Bending. Be sure to start in front of the freezer door, avoiding ice flakes and pools of melted ice as you move.


Next week we will learn a series of Laundry Room exercises, starting with the Laundry Basket Long Jump (as it will be necessary to employ this to get into the Laundry Room).

Wordless Wednesday

11:30 am

2:00 pm

This post was inspired by Mad's cleaning reports.

Cripes, Here Comes Santa Claus

My link function seems to be down. Sorry!

The Elder Daughter called last night to tell me that Little Stuff's Christmas Concert is this afternoon. Little Stuff's class will be singing Chansons de Noel, she is requested to inform me, and teacher's instructions are that the children are to dress like princes and princesses. And would Grama and Grandpa like to come? Well, of course. But Grandpa left an hour ago for a meeting that will take all day. It is now 8:00 am, and as I look out the window, freezing rain is settling on everything like a silver scarf. However, if it stops I will attempt to make the hour drive, as the sight of Little Stuff in her Christmas red velvet dress with lace stockings, glittery shoes and a red velvet headband is one that I would be sad to miss. Even if she is overcome with stage fright, as well may happen.

For a wonderful description of a joyous Christmas concert child, take a look at Andrea's post about Frances' debut at A Garden of Nna Mmoy.

I have been reading a most riveting book, The Price of Motherhood. Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued. By Ann Crittenden. Crittenden is a journalist, former reporter for the New York Times, and, judging by this book, a most formidable researcher and analyst. The book was published in 2001 but I do believe most of the issues and data are very current for 2008. And the book has really shaken me, partly because I did not know how much worse off American women are than Canadian.

I know, because I deal with the effects, how debilitating low income motherhood is for both the mothers and the children. I wrote a bit about the effects in a November post titled 'Charity Begins at Home'. And I have long thought that working like mad to support food banks and remedial programs, to provide simple things like picture books and Christmas stockings and snowsuits as 'charity' is the least productive way to deal with this huge problem. Crittenden has a chapter of ideas on the subject, which I intend to get into later. I don't have the time to do it now because I have a house full of tasks to accomplish before Christmas, and I am almost time critical.

What? A woman with all her children grown and retired from her work years is time critical? Yes, indeed. I am cooking Christmas dinner for the whole crew, for one thing. This will give the ED one day off her incredible schedule of full time work combined with homemaking for her four year old and stepsons. Helpful as her partner is, her life is a series of compromises. The (single and childless) YD contemplated putting on Christmas dinner this year, but her travel schedule is extremely heavy and boiled down to a choice of either hosting or visiting her 91 year old grandmother for a pre Christmas visit. I also have some Board tasks over the next two days, the house to decorate, a Barbie doll dress to make (this deserves a post of its own!) other home made Christmas presents to finish (I procrastinate) and a pile of other self imposed but traditional Christmas stuff to do. Countdown, six days. One of which is today, and the rain seems to have stopped, so I am off to a concert, camera in hand.

Little Stuff told her mother that it was okay if I didn't come as long as her mother took lots of pictures. She is used to being put second, poor little mutt. The least I can do is get there myself.
Ho, ho, ho.

October Song

This is the first time in over a week that I have had a chance to write a post, and I can hear thunder in the distance, signaling that I may have to shut down the computer or that I may lose the satellite signal that connects me to my virtual world. Bummer. In the meantime, though, it's beautiful. We still have a lot of gold and bronze leaves on the trees and the rain and wind are knocking them off -- they're swirling past my window, high contrast against the grey/black storm cloud to the south. There's a soft sibilance as the rain hits them and tiny splatting noises as they hit the deck. And as a counterpoint to that, there's the sound of clucking and squawking as a flock of fifteen turkeys straggles past the open window, chattering among themselves. As I write this, the sky is getting brighter and the gold leaves are glowing. No more thunder; I may even get this done and up.

I have just been playing around with Facebook, a toy world which the YD seduced me into several weeks ago. It's a champion time waster at the moment, but it is allowing me to get my trip photographs up and indexed so that the friends we went with can see them. I had meant to do a travel post, but this is easier. I may still get the post done as well because I have some really good pictures. Or at least so says my BIL, who is an amazing photographer and whose opinion I value highly. Plus he's a tech whiz and I now know how to shrink my photos to easily loadable sizes without hauling them through a photo paint program. Well, I'll get it done if I can refrain from adding things like Visual Bookshelf to my Facebook page -- fun but a real time eater.

Do they give out championships for procrastination? Is there a twelve step program? Timewasters R Us? Although I don't count time looking out the window at the world as wasted, exactly, it isn't getting the laundry done. Nor the six or seven documents sitting on my desktop waiting to be edited. Nor the letter for the Hall Committee. Nor the fundraising phone calls. I've got a pile of sewing and mending including Little Stuff's Hallowe'en cat costume. If it would ever stop raining, there are flowerbeds to put to sleep, and a lot of tidying up around the house. Wednesday morning it did stop and we raked leaves. You would never know it. But here I am, eating cookies and typing and thinking about the old joke about work. 'I'm not afraid of work! I can sit right here beside it and do nothing.'

Posting, for me, is not work. It's my virtual window to the world and time spent looking through it is not wasted. How I love to read about what all of you are doing and thinking. Pause there while I took some photos of the leaves pattering down. The big sugar maple by the corner of the deck has a circle of gold below it and the wind is whisking more off all the time. And the sky is darkening again. More thunder. More rain now. There's a pair of soggy blue jays vacuuming up the corn that the turkeys left behind. And I have to stop for a minute and close the windows since it is really raining hard now. Wonderful. I get back and the satellite is now down.

Well that gives me time to download and edit the leaf pictures I just ran out in the rain to take so that I could illustrate this post. And to think about the flying feet of time, since I have just spent the morning writing this, playing with it and dealing with a series of phone calls. eheu! fugaces labuntur anni. Not to mention minutes, seconds and hours. I don't want to stop time. Nor even turn it back. But I would love to have more of it. Time to do things well, without scanting other things. Time to look out of the window without worrying about the unwashed clothes. Time to write really good posts about meaningful things, instead of babbling on. Well, this babble will have to do as the satellite is now back up and I have to get back to the real world. Always vowing to do better next time. To stop squandering the time I have. Hollow laughter. And that's not a noise the turkeys are making.

Hanging Out

Thursday was a blanket day. That is what my mother would have called it. A sunny day with low humidity and a good breeze, not too windy, and warm. When I was a girl and such a day would manifest itself in late spring, I would be sent to haul the woolen blankets downstairs to the washer and we would peg them out on the clothesline where they would flap away and dry all fluffy and sweet smelling.

It amused me a great deal to find, in a glossy magazine, instructions on how to acquire and use a clothesline and how environmentally meritorious such an act would be, with specific instructions on how to hang things out, in detail. It amused me because, unreconstructed dinosaur that I am, I have been hanging my laundry out for the last 40+ years. 'Tops by the bottoms, bottoms by the tops' my mother would chant as we plunked the wicker clothes basket down between us and she strung the lines from the garage to the pole. This was Windsor in the '50s, and if you left the clotheslines up all week they would be blackened by smoke from the coal fired generators upwind in Michigan. And as soon as the white wash load was dry, it came down and into the kitchen where it was dampened and rolled, and on Tuesday night, while listening to the ball game on the radio, my mother would iron it. Or I would, except for my father's white shirts which I was not allowed to do until I was 14 or so.

I hang out all of the big pieces I wash. Socks and underwear and some permanent press things go into the drier, but the rest goes out to the clothesline. Summer and winter. (If you use surgical gloves, in really cold temperatures, the springs of the clothespins will not freeze to your fingers.) In the winter, the towels and shirts often are still half frozen when I take them down and so I put them on a line in the basement to air dry and the whole basement smells wonderful. In the summer I have to get the dried items back inside as soon as possible because both hummingbirds and mourning doves love to sit on my clothesline and while hummingbird poop can be spot cleaned (you never heard that here!) the clothes with dove chalk on them have to be rewashed. In spite of these drawbacks, I still put the clothes out both because they smell better and because the shirts are easier to iron.

It was lovely to be told I am helping the environment.

When you line dry your clothes, you have to be aware of the weather. You track percentages of rain and when the front is expected to arrive. You have to have enough socks and underwear for everyone to be able to last from washday to washday. You have to put up with your husband and kids complaining that what they want to wear is not clean and back in the closet yet. 'It's been rainy for the last two days,' you explain more than once. 'Wear something else'. I guess you have to be a bit stubborn. And you have to have the time to hang out and take in, and the space to put the clothesline. There's still a suburb in Ottawa, I believe, where clotheslines are forbidden by municipal regulation. They're unsightly, you see.

In the days before clothes driers, laundry hanging was part of everyone's life and, believe it or not, a subject of competition and stress. A woman whose white sheets were not pristine white would lose homemaker points. My grandmother lived on a farm where the houses of two of my grandfather's brothers were visible on either side. Who could get the wash out first became a seriously competitive exercise. My grandfather would come in from milking and announce that Mabel had her sheets out and my grandmother would snarl. The family joke was that Mabel put her sheets out dry just to one up my grandmother. My husband's grandmother had a running war with a neighbour who had a degree in home economics and insisted that Granny was hanging her shirts wrong. 'The interfering old thing', Granny snarled. The woman in question was at least a decade younger than Granny, but the insult was at least some relief to her feelings. Granny was from an era when you were Trained At Home for household tasks and homemaking was a vocation.

It's not, for me, but you will see me stamping out in my boots and parka with a basket of steaming sheets until arthritis shuts me down, keeping a weather eye on the clouds and thinking evil thoughts about doves and BB guns. And blanket days are perfect for airing duvets.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

I had a lovely time last evening roaming around the mommy blog world while JG watched the Quebec election results. The only downer was to read about other people experiencing spring as I live through the frozen mud and slush that is an integral part of Eastern Ontario's March. Although spring has been arriving earlier the last few years, I assume because of global warming. When I first lived here, in the Sixties, the snow melted in April but now it is happening in March, two years out of three. Anyway, we have a week of good 'sugaring' weather forecast -- the sap runs best if there is a variation of +5 to -5 Celsius degrees, with sun, and Environment Canada says that is what we are going to get.

One of the things that impresses me most is how well people do dialogue as they record what their little ones are doing and saying. Another is how wide the range of interests and abilities is, especially among the mothers of children with challenges whom you would think would have less time and energy even than the rest of us to record their lives. I work with the mother of a boy with Down's Syndrome (Is Trisomy 21 now preferred? She uses DS when she talks about him) whose days are precision scheduled, structured around where he is and what he needs next. I remember well how hectic my life was when I went back to work full time, and my girls were pretty self sufficient by then.

"If you can fill the unrelenting minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run,' said Kipling. It's that 'unrelenting minute' that is so apt. Whether you are a working-outside-the-home mother or not, life is a mass of detail, scheduling and endless tasks of the sort that have to be done again and again. Plus, it is my observation that a lot of fathers -- a lot of men -- opt out of the detail even if they are really useful otherwise. The Elder Daughter's man does his share of the housework and child care, for example, but if he can't find something he needs he expects the ED to know.

When I first started back to work full time JG offered to do the grocery shopping to help out. I was touched and delighted -- and really taken aback when, on the first occasion of his doing it, he strolled into the kitchen and said, 'I'm ready to go. Where's the list?' I had assumed that making the list was part of the task. Silly me. In my observation men do what they choose to do and women both do the remainder and keep track of the whole thing. Daddy will drive the kids to their music lessons, but mommy knows when the lessons are, that kind of division of labour. I would be glad to know this is not so but I swear I have never met a man who was a household gatekeeper.

Sometimes I dream of a world where everyone's schedule and tasks are flexible. Where it would be assumed that paid employment for everyone was arranged so that the work of the home did not have to be done in snatched minutes of multi-tasking mayhem. Where the childcare and minutiae of daily life have importance! ('Do you work?' 'No, I'm a stay-at-home mom.') Where I wouldn't have to worry that my driven and madly multi-tasking daughter is going to crash and burn.

And Quebec is going to have a minority government. Fascinating.

The Latin title, very roughly rendered, means 'who will look after the guardians (gatekeepers)'? Would you believe I studied Latin language and literature for four interminable years of University?

Busy as a Beaver

Busy as a Beaver

I managed to catch this image last fall as the pesky thing was storing up branches for winter food. I took over twenty shots to get one good one, which is pretty standard for my photographs. And as good a place as any for me to start. This is my very first post. I've been reading and occasionally commenting on other people's efforts for a while, wondering if I really wanted or needed to do this. The best blogs I've found have been those of mothers with very young children (and I'm about to turn sixty-five with a three year old granddaughter), science fiction aficionadas (I'm an addict) and custom carpenters. What in heaven's name does that range of interests tell anyone. It's taken me a while to decide to stick my prose out.

I have also decided to omit all references to my husband except for the most superficial, because he is a very private man and it would both hurt and horrify him to find himself discussed on line. I've been following the debate on several blogs about how much to reveal about family, especially husbands and minor children (see a garden of nna mmoy), and I've found some really excellent discussion and thinking about it. Tentative conclusion is that my daughters will have to take their chances, and the granddaughter can be disguised. But what this space needs to do is give me a voice of my own as I cope with becoming a certified senior, a far too busy volunteer, an on-call grama and, I am very much afraid, a senior with increasing health issues.

Back to Mary the beaver and her pile of sticks. I do a small graphics business out of a home office, and the whole office is strewn with piles of stuff to be filed, sorted and rationalized. Four or five binders from the board of directors of a local organization where I'm vice chair (and the chair is in Arizona, sniff) balance precariously on top of the first stratum. The basement is full of laundry. I have a ToDo list headed "Find the ToDo lists". I need to clean the freezer before I run out of cold weather. My kitchen drawers would not impress Martha. I have lived in this house for twelve years and I still do not have doors or trim on most of the rooms. I need to paint this spring; bedroom, bathrooms, two porches, one huge deck, half of which appears here. I want a vacation. All of the above are irrelevant and can be ignored, except the vacation. I'm tired. It would be a lot simpler to pile up some books and branches and take to the den.

Books have always been my best friends, therapy, indulgence. I'll give anything in print a try and I read over and over again favourites like Tolkien, Jane Austen, Dorothy Sayers. I read all of the display ads in the two daily papers we take. I read signs along the highway. Finding the blogging community is just a new form of that addiction. I'm not sure what writing a blog myself is going to be about, but this form of reading is not a one way street. I find myself writing very differently when what I write could be read and responded to. I think this is what I need right now. Whether the blogging world needs me is quite a different matter. Time to get brave, publish this and get on with the next thing.

Note: May edit

I have just removed some references to my husband from this post. I have done this because I have decided to take the blog public and he may ask to read it.