Things are Going Swimmingly

Two years ago today I tentatively stuck a toe into the blogging ocean and shortly thereafter got sucked right out to sea. That's 239 posts and although there are a fair number that are photos or memes, a lot of them have cost me time, skull sweat and frustration. A few of them have garnered me some much needed and gratefully received compliments. It is scary to put parts of yourself on public display, and I find myself at times very insecure about it. Especially since I am an old, gray fish in a school of glittering young ones. I sometimes feel very diffident about hanging about with the mommy bloggers. They all seem to have better stocked minds, intimidating writing skills and a level of technical competence that I struggle to attain.

It is such a wonderful ocean, warm and full of ticklish bubbles, vast and ever changing. [Don't you think you have taken that metaphor far enough? hisses my internal editor.] As I slowly began to find my way around the place, I discovered that the voices and opinions I liked best, the writers with whom I had empathy, were 'mommy bloggers'. I discovered blog after blog sparkling with wit and erudition, funny, wistful, sad. And every one had something to teach me. Most of these blogs are on the blogroll on the lower right hand side of this screen; not all of them because a few, for some reason I can't fathom, won't load into my 'Following' gizmo. I am contemplating trying to find and load a widget I see around the places I go that allows you to list favourite posts. I need courage, coffee and a lot of time before I tackle adding gadgets.

I am only going to mention one blog in particular because we share the blogiversary - her third and my second. This is Under the Mad Hat (Happy third to you, Mad!), who is one of the cleverest bloggers out there. Her posts are amazingly good; she has one of the quicksilver minds I cherish and an understated and somewhat wry humour that sets you off laughing an hour or a day after you have signed off.

This on line world is not a natural fit for me. For quite some time I printed a hard copy of every draft post and went over it with the dreaded red pen. After two years, I no longer do that, but when I put a post up and see a typo or infelicity or bad cut sneering at me, I wonder if I still should. The brain does not function with the speed it had a quarter century ago, that's for sure. And I never have had the kind of concentration and dedication a professional writer needs. [I just leapt up and grabbed the field glasses to check out a bird that flew by my office window. Now, where was I?]

I was I was both surprised and flattered lately when a group of mommybloggers headed by Catherine of Her Bad Mother and Katie of Motherbumper asked me to join a group concern called Canada Moms Blog. I have joined and as I sit here, I have a pile of printouts beside me on the desk detailing all the steps to take to get enrolled and use Typepad. Oh, my aching head. The printouts are already dog-eared and marked up in red with stars and arrows and I did one major goof in my first post on the site that I don't know how to fix. Setting aside the fact that I have to learn how to do Technorati tags, the style of post they want is different from my usual ramble along twisting paths and I am editing, rewriting, second, third and fourth guessing myself and gulping down yet more coffee. And loving every moment, do not get me wrong. They do say that intellectual activity is good for ageing brains, don't they?

I guess I have swum come a long way in two years, eh?

The first ending of this post has been edited and is shown below. Daysgoby has just told me how to do this. Heartfelt thanks and I will share the cookies.

Now, if I could just figure out how to do that cross out thing, I could have written swum, crossed it out and put in come. Which would make a lovely metaphor bracket. I'm going to learn how to do that. Someday. Soon. More coffee, I need more coffee.

And maybe a chocolate raspberry marshmallow cookie.

Monday Mission - Grocery Store Medley

There goes Shopping Mom, there goes Shopping Mom,
Down the grocery store aisle,
She's got a list two pages long
The cart's piled up a mile!
Cans are rattlin', people scatterin'
The lady's on the run.
Get out of her way, there's hell to pay
'Cause the shopping's not yet done!
~
Baby cries, she can't feed him,
Children whine, though she's bribed 'em.
The omens are clear that the time has drawn near
To screw the list and get the monsters home...
Um,
To check out now and take the poor things home.
~
Now the kids are fast asleep,
She's on her second rye,
But Shopping Mom still has a list
Of things she has to buy.
So she writes to Santa Claus
Tells him of her plight
Could he finish off her list
And bring it round that night.
~
'I'll believe in you', she wrote,
'If you believe in me.'
'Santa, Sweetie,
Just drop it down my chimney tonight.'
~
There's a blip on the radar at NORAD
And it's not even Christmas Eve,
The guys on the radar at NORAD
Are seeing what they don't believe.

There's a sleigh and eight reindeer at Best Buy
And some elves with a grocery list.
They're packing up sacks of food and stuff
It's a sight not to be missed.

Down the road to Mom's they go
And unload all the food.
Mom's hung over but happy now
And she's really in the Christmas mood.

With no apologies at all to the demented and evil creators of 'Here Comes Santa Claus', 'Winter Wonderland', 'Jolly Old St Nicholas', 'Santa Baby', and 'Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer'. (I figure you might need the references.)

You have got to go and look at Ewe Are Here's take on the MM.
She's done much the same kind of Christmas muzac I did and it is totally hilarious.

Destroyed by the Detail

Yesterday I had an early medical appointment in the city and so I decided to make a day of it and do a whole lot of Christmas shopping. I put on my city boots (dress boots with a modest heel) and took two huge plastic bags to carry the shopping, my pile of Angel Tree cards, my very long grocery list, ............some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note. (Stike that last and substitute credit and debit card.) I left the house at what was for me a very early hour, driving my husband's truck.
Some of this was a great mistake.
I had to park at the mall at a distance from the door because I am not good at parking the truck. I trotted around the mall (three stories and about a mile long in each storey, or so it felt) gathering up gifts and filling up my bags. After a while I began to hurt. My back spasmed and my game knee was giving me fits. Hauling a couple of increasingly heavy bags while wearing heels was not a smart move. Not at all. I limped slowly out to the truck and dumped the bags and that gave me some relief, but the back and the feet and the knee were not letting up much. I decided to abandon the mall and go to Walmart, figuring that there would be less walking and that the stuff I had left on the list would be available there in one spot and I could lean on a cart.
I forgot how big Walmart is. I finally got the list done, comforted my afflicted body with a truly horrible hamburger and some coffee and limped back to the truck and off to the grocery store, also a big box, and got a huge load of groceries. Then I drove home, with my legs at the awkward angle they have to be in to drive the truck, humped all this Stuff into the house, staggered around getting supper, ate and collapsed with two extra strength pain pills and the first decent cup of coffee I had had all day.
This morning I am still hurting. I will never, never wear those boots shopping again. However, I have a lovely pile of loot. Pity I can't post the way it smells; there is cinnamon and cranberry soap in there.

Now. I am getting off the computer and I am going to Clean My Office. And I am not getting back on until I have done it. In the interests of self discipling, I am now posting the 'Before' shots. No more internet until I have 'After' shots. I may be gone for a while, she said, shuddering. The computer age was supposed to be paperless, wasn't it?

I'm hanging out in my daughter's basement again, posting on her laptop. Very slowly and clumsily. My computer has a pull out drawer for the keyboard and a very sensitive mouse and I can type like the wind (well, a good breeze) with very few errors. On a laptop on top of a desk, with a tracker pad, I am clumsy, I put my fingers on the wrong lines and I mutter to myself. As to why I am here instead of at home with my own equipment, I have a dental appointment at 7:15 AM tomorrow morning. Since we live an hour's drive from the city (if it is not rush hour) and since rush hour starts around 6:45 am, I had the choice of getting up at the crack of dawn or begging a bed from a daughter. Since I am not, repeat not, a morning person, the choice was easy. I am still going to have to crawl out of bed before six. More muttering.

I was at a party last Saturday, enjoying myself and virtuously munching on celery when there was an ominous crunching noise. In my mouth, and not the celery. An inlay came out of the top back molar, breaking the side of the tooth as it came. This required an emergency trip to my dentist and she said that what was neeeded was a root canal and then a crown. The dental surgery office she uses was very busy; her receptionist pleaded with someone and as a favour I got this 7:15 slot. The alternative seemed to be to eat nothing but pasta until the middle of next month. Mutter, grumble, snarl.

This is probably a lot more than you really wanted to know about the inside of my mouth, I bet.

I spent this morning writing up a set of meeting notes with illustrative graphs attached. This afternoon I finished off planting the geraniums in the planters. I got a wonderful deep, deep red this year and have planted them with deep blue 'Wave' petunias. Once they take hold, I will post a photo of this glory. And I have one iris in bloom, after planting 27. It was the wrong time of year to move them and I knew that and did it anyway, so it serves me right. The bed should look pretty nifty next year, however. Then I packed up all the alarm clocks I could find and drove into the city, where I spent a happy hour buying sunhats for Little Stuff. Four, which is what her mother thinks she needs. Two wide brims with straw, a big floppy cloth one and a small one for wearing in the boat, because big floppy ones blow off. One has a flower. I hope she will be pleased. This saves her poor mother a trip to the mall, and since her mother is even busier than I am, a Good Deed.

All of the above a reason, not an apology, for not posting much at all lately. The last few weeks have been full of days like that. This last weekend, the ED, Little Stuff and I went to a shower for my eldest great niece. She was registered at Ashley and at Restoration Hardware. She was registered for sheets and towels at Restoration Hardware, which is as unlike a normal hardware store as I could imagine. Pricy stuff, too. But really good quality and lovely colours. I don't blame the GN for putting this stuff on her list. Even if my credit card is a little limp.

This business of a store selling all sorts of stuff you wouldn't expect is fascinating me. We have a chain in Ontario called Canadian Tire. It does sell tires, but it also sells plants, paint, home furnishings, some clothing, dog and bird food, etc. The big box grocery where I shop sells clothing as well as almost everything else, including lawn furniture and televisions. Now I find Restoration Hardware selling soft goods. My book store does a fine line in candles and various picture frames, exercise equipment and coffee. All of this stuff makes the display area enormous and you need a GPS to find the cash. It wasn't like this in the Good Old Days. When I wasn't walking ten miles to school in the snow (uphill both ways) I was shopping in a 'groceteria' that was smaller than the paint department at Restoration Hardware. There was a local shop that sold meat, and one that sold fruit and vegetables. The corner store sold magazines, tobacco and evil sugary treats at a penny each. And, when Ithink about it, I walked just as far from store to store as I do slogging around the big box emporiums. And it does not snow inside them.

Okay, my brain is fried. I will try to do a coherent post sometime soon.

A Window

Did I mention, the last (long ago) time I posted, that I am making seven princess costumes for Little Stuff's birthday party? Here are the first two. Three broken needles, innumerable rethreadings, too many replacements of a loose footplate and recurrent tension problems all make me think it is Time For a New Sewing Machine!!! I even have a clipping of what I want which has been sitting on my desk for a year. I need, as my daughter's friends used to say, to get a life.

Oh, yes, one of the skirt elastics unthreaded just as I thought I was done. Grrr. And when I tried to iron the gold overlay on the pink outfit, it fused to the iron. Luckily it scrubbed off easily, as I like my iron and do not want to buy a new one of those.

Five more to go.

And then I may get back to regular posting. Or not, if I also have to replace this computer. It is slower than molasses etc.

What else have I been doing besides sewing? Line dancing, for one thing. Love it! I got an MP3 player for my birthday, and am now trying to learn how to download the music I need for the dancing. Anyone know who is the perp of Liar's Waltz? Can't find anything other than a group of that name. And they don't play waltzes. We are to the level of learning 'four wall' dances now in the class I am taking. A four wall dance is one in which the whole line of dancers turns a quarter turn four times, ending up, one hopes, back facing the original direction. Sometimes I even do.

This month is sheer misery for meetings -- and some of them are up to two hours' drive away. Sigh. I went to one yesterday, we settled a tender, we thought, and when I got home there was an email waiting saying that the decision we had come to was not in accord with the CHC's policy on tenders and we would have to meet again. Grr #2.

However, the first hummingbird arrived today, all the trillia are in bloom and it is cool enough that the blackflies are not totally obnoxious. I need to transplant my iris, pdq. In between costumes three and four, perhaps.

I volunteered for this costume thing. I love to make costumes. But it sure is eating into my blogging and reading time.

And JG wants shishkabobs for supper. Is he threading little pieces of stuff onto skewers? Hah! So I am signing off, and you know where I am going. Grr #3.

Lack of Resolution(s)

I don't make New Year's resolutions any more. I used to do so. Many years ago I used to start out each January with a list of things that I would do and things that I would stop doing. A long list. Which quickly curled at the corners, gathered dust and ended up under the couch with the half eaten jelly beans and broken red crayons. Noticing that this was not A Good Thing, I began to make shorter lists with more doable things on them. I would then delay the start of the good deeds and denials for unassailably logical reasons such as: well, the Christmas candy is gone but it is only three weeks until Valentine's Day and I will get lots more then, so I will begin the diet/exercise program on March 1st. It is easily possible, given a little determination, to forget all about the New Year's Resolution List by February 28th. I assure you that it is.

Being forcibly reminded of the chocolate generated spare tire and inflated derriere by the commencement of the bathing suit season, I could reasonably decide to make a new set of resolutions to take effect, entirely logically, after the end of the berry and sweet corn season when giving up sprinkles of sugar and gobs of butter would, of course, become easier.

Early in October, when failing to do up the zipper of the heavy weight trousers retrieved from storage, I would, of course, realize that dieting/eating sensibly was of no avail because, so close to Thanksgiving, I should wait until after the holiday dinner when it would, miraculously, be too close to Christmas and the essential obligation of eating the treats of the season to bother. Easier to buy some new trousers.

At present I am avoiding the scales, the mirror and most of my wardrobe. 'Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,' as they say. My mouth is full of delicious Christmas gift chocolate as I type this. My BIL gave me Turin Bailey's filled chocolates. My husband gave me chocolate truffles. The ED put a Lindt bar in my stocking. The eldest grandson contributed a chocolate filled chocolate log. (Absolutely marvelous!) Could anyone suppose, even for an instant, that I would blithely begin, on January 1st, to count my calories, join a weight loss group or even eat more sensibly? As far as I can see, my only recourse is to pig out on this heavenly fare until it is all gone, and to do it as quickly as possible so that the increased curve of my tum and bum do not settle in for a long stay.

If you do not think this is a credible course of action, I do not want to hear it, okay?

For those of you who want me to come and tidy up for you, I would be glad to do so. That is, after I deal with the Christmas stuff, which is still in a pile in the doorway of my laundry/sewing room because I have to clean the storage room and there is no room in the laundry room because of the pile of unironed Christmas tablecloths and the mending which has been accumulating since (blush) last January. No exaggeration.

If I had a list of resolutions, these items would be on it, along with the bathroom shelves and under sink cupboard, the drawers in my night table and the unfinished Christmas present for Little Stuff which I now have scheduled to be finished for her birthday. In May. But, of course, I do not have a list. Or if I do, it is in the knitting basket with the size two sweater sleeves.

Hey, procrastination is an art form. It takes a lot of work to do it right.

Monday Mission -- Creating Christmas.

This week's Monday Mission was to get creative with photo-editing software (I use Corel's PhotoPaint). Since I love doing this stuff I tried to be extremely, wipe your eye, creative. (After all, I'm in the same cosmos with Julie the whiz photographer and other amazingly gifted folk.) I built a Christmas tree with the ornaments zooming forward. When I tried to load it, Blogger did not, to put it mildly, co-operate. Nope. It paused, hung and finally rejected my offering. Which caused my computer, in turn, to hang and have to be rebooted. I thought I was inside the size limit, but something didn't work. And so -- you will just have to use your imaginations.


In my household, we do not buy Christmas trees. We schlep out into the bush and cut one. Since in my household we long ago gave up trying to trim trees in situ ahead of time, this trip involves much arguing between JG and me about the size and branchiness of the tree. He likes tall. I like enough branches to hold my ornament collection. This year, he won.

The chosen tree was on the bank of one of the beaver ponds, and we have a lot of snow already. What shape and branchiness the uncut tree demonstrated was somewhat changed by being 1.) dragged through the snow and slush on the pond and 2.) loaded onto the back of the Kubota to be trundled home and 3.) the tip being inadvertently dragged behind all the way back. When we got it home both the top and the bottom had to be trimmed.

A little tinsel covers a multitude of sins.


I have a wonderful collection of angels for my tree, thoughtfully collected over many years. Some are gifts my peripatetic YD has brought back from foreign trips. This one is from Kosovo, I think.


This one is hand made, and very delicate. It works to hang it high on the tree on a branch that will not support the weight of a glass ball.





And this one was chosen by Little Stuff. The head is bisque. As you can see, all the angels are set off by red shiny balls and stars. I have two sets of lights, because I switched to the cool LED ones a year too soon and, since I did not like the blued white, bought gold. The next year the manufacturers came out with a good white. And so, one year there are white angels, red ornamants and white lights, and the next year there are gold ornaments and gold lights. Although I enjoy this, it does make for a storage problem. There are lots of plastic boxes in the basement shelves and I have to figure out which ones I need on any given year. Some year I may even label them, impossibly organized as that seems.







Edited to say: Good grief! I wish I knew the principles behind some of the positioning decisions this text editor makes. I have now simply stacked the thing; not good, but maybe better.

Blowin' in the Wind

We just got back from our monthly run to the dump (for city folks, note that no one comes for your garbage when you live 'in the bush'.) As usual I come back discouraged and a bit sick because of the mess that is our local garbage disposal site. Plastic bags festoon the trees and bushes all around, and especially downwind, the paper recycle has a huge pile of soggy cardboard outside in the mud, there is a lot of stuff in the actual tip that should not be there and the recycle shed has been closed because no one is prepared to look after it.

It's the plastic bag part I mind the most. For the last year or so all of the bigger stores in our shopping town have contributed to a cloth bag campaign. The bags cost a dollar, are available to buy in most stores and hold a lot of stuff. They fold flat when not in use, are washable and light. A lot of people have adopted them with enthusiasm, but you'd never know it at our waste site. Part of the problem is bears -- they get into the tip when the dump is not open, tear open the green bags and rummage through for anything good. The smaller plastic bags all get ripped open and scattered and then they blow. After the bears have had a good rummage the crows arrive, and loosen any bags the bears might have missed. Some of the township waste sites have electric fencing to keep the bears out, but ours is almost full and due to be closed so this improvement has not been made. And the bags blow.

When we built the house I persuaded JG that I needed a cupboard in the kitchen for recycle and I have capacity to store cans and plastic for about a month. Glass has to go into the tip, as the local recycle business cannot find a market for it, but at least it is inert, so I don't mind throwing it in there. I have two big compost bins, and we burn the clean paper. That leaves uncompostable scraps and plastic wrap to ditch. The other big item is newspapers -- we take two dailies and three local weeklies, plus an enormous number of coloured advertising fliers -- but that gets recycled, thus using up my cardboard boxes to pack it in. And I confess to the fact that a lot of the uncompostable but edible scrap gets dumped back in the bush, thus making the local raccoons plump and happy. So we lug boxes of paper, usually two bins of recycle and one small bag of the rest.

The waste disposal site at a hamlet not far away still has a recycle centre. This is a lot of fun as books, baby clothes, small appliances and lots of other fascinating stuff is all sorted and stored in an old trailer where you can go and add and subtract. There is also a local habit of plonking good junk down at the end of the laneway so that neighbours and passers by can see it and take it away if they like it. JG is enthralled with a jar of goodies one of our neighbours has set out, but so far has not succumbed.

He is a real problem -- you do not want to let him lose at an auction because he bids on boxes of mixed goodies and then keeps it all. He has lumberjack tools, a complete welding outfit, hardwood plank storage, building equipment and supplies and tools, automotive tools, and more. At present we have three storage buildings (one with two annexes) and a garage and the only reason the garage is not stuffed is that we only finished building it in December. Give him time and the cars may be back outside again.

Although I am not, blush, blameless myself. I can't bear to get rid of books and the cabin that we built here before the full time house is at present housing my paperback collection, because the hardcover books take up all the bookcase space in this fairly large house. There are probably 200 books in the office, some of which show in the photo behind the bag, and more bookcases in the living room and bedroom and TV room downstairs. And I need more bookcases. So, while I complain about JG the packrat here, I would not dare complain to his face. 'What about all your books?', he would say. Maybe I had better let him investigate that jar!

Spongehead!

Does anyone else have the kind of absorbent mind that holds on to words and expressions and phrases like a sponge full of soap? I do crossword puzzles, and if I don't try to remember something, but just write what my mind turns up, I am frequently correct. (If I try to remember someone's name, a big white blank turns up, but that's another problem.) My mind is like my grandmother's button box; a huge jumble of things with no provenance. I can recite multiple verses of nursery rhymes I learned as a child, pop songs from when I was a teenager and jingles from products long vanished from the shelves.

Wow, I hear you say. How marvellous! Well, not entirely. You see I often do not remember where I got a particularly nice set of words. Dysfunctional associative memory. Up comes a lovely phrase, and if I don't watch it, I think it's mine. This is all by the way of prefacing an apology to Bub and Pie, whose caption for her link list I repeated with a small variation when I set up mine. The words I remembered were: 'Oh, the places I've been, oh, the people I've seen". I think it should be 'Oh, the places I go, Oh, the people I know.' From 'Winnie the Pooh'? Robert Louis Stevenson? Oh, rats! I have embarrassed myself far too often by failing to attribute something, or taking it as my own. Sorry, bubandpie!

And on the subject of memory -- little kids have a fantastic ability to remember something they've heard and come out with it, word perfect, on the worst possible occasion. Or they call you on something you said way back when and you think, "Whoa, you're only three years old, you're not supposed to remember that!" This is your kids. Your grandchildren have you on toast, because when they tell you that you promised them something, you can't remember whether you did say it or not, so you end up going along with it.

And Little Stuff also corrects me when I recite nursery rhymes that do not quite match the version in *her* book. She may have inherited my spongebrain, at that.

My head is stuffed with cotton, hay and rags!

I'm not sure who said that, but I'm guessing it was the Scarecrow in 'The Wizard of Oz'. Like him, I could sure use a brain transfer. Thank you for your informative emails -- I am now ready to try to add links here. Soon. Not to-day because I am still smarting from having the Blogger editor eat yesterday's attempt to post. I got it up and even previewed it but the preview was not exactly like the actual post and when I saw it there I didn't like the length or punctuation, once I saw it on the screen. I then tried to edit it. The punctuation would not change and the changes would not repost. I tried yelling at it, reasoning with it and ended up sobbing and pleading that I was an old lady and it wasn't FAIR! In the end I deleted the dern thing. Wasn't a great piece of writing anyway.

To-day I was going to try getting a picture onto my profile, but I just checked my email and got hit on to do a couple of things this afternoon, so maybe later. When I feel stronger. And smarter.

I never have been particularly organized; my drawers, filing cabinet and thought processes are all a mess. I keep string, elastic bands, clothes I can't wear, useless bits of information, poetry and esoteric vocabulary in these locations. Under them may or may not be found the scissors, clean underwear and information about our health insurance that I'm asked for. I am also not a good time manager. After 44 years you would think he would know better, but my poor husband keeps making suggestions about how to make things better. For instance: "I would think you would trip on all those papers on the floor." "Do I have any socks?" "You don't usually iron in the evening, do you?"

He needs to do the same things at the same time in the same way every day. He needs me to do that too. And I'm hopeless. Am I out the door running the errands I was asked to do? No, I am sitting here typing. Our elder daughter struggled as a toddler and small girl with separation issues, phobias, unidentifiable fears. As late as her last year of high school she needed to know where I was if she had something stressful going on. I didn't have to be with her, but she needed to know she could reach me if she had to. Her daughter is a lot the same and when she stays here she keeps close beside me all the time. Both my husband and my daughter are highly successful people. You would think I could learn. Only I don't.

Oh, yeah, and the spell checker is a bit anal retentive on this thing. (Sorry, Google programmers. You sound so proud of your 'Out of Beta' editor.)

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.