Rendezvous with some wind

Two part post.

Part One.

For the first time in eight years, no child was sleeping in the house with us last night.  Nor will there be one tomorrow night or the next night, etc., all the way to the weekend.  We left them at the side of the road.  Ok, no, we left them at grandma’s.   Where they will be completely spoiled because grandma loves them completely and will do absolutely anything for them.  This trip was planned last week, completely ignorant of the possibility of a hurricane.  (More on the hurricane later.)

Leaving them up there was very difficult.  They’re about five hours away by highway.  The two older Sonars have each spent time at grandma’s, but this was the first stay for Sonar X3 without us.  And the first time for all three of them to be away from us at the same time.  Walking away from my kids, whether for a few minutes or a few hours or a few days is difficult for me.  I always feel this horrible tugging feeling that makes me want to get all teary.  But then I don’t want them to feel bad for wanting to do whatever it is they want to do without me, in this case hanging out with grandma for a week.  So I put on my brave face and try not to get teary until after I get in the car and wave cheerfully and turn the corner.  

I’m not saying that I get this way every time I leave them somewhere—I have an almost-third-grader and if I got teary every time he went to school I think I’d have a problem.  But leaving them when I know I can’t be there in a few minutes.  Leaving them for a week.  Leaving them somewhere for the first (or maybe even the second or third time), well, that’s a little bit of a challenge for me.  

But.  It is good for us.  It’s good for me to miss then and know that all of the times I want to choke them aren’t really worth the choking because I really do like to have them around.  It’s good for them to grow and have experiences and develop relationships that are separate from me.  

And.  Well, it’s nice to be alone with that guy over there.  To spend some extended time with him that is independent of schedules and is just about him and me communicating with each other and hanging out and doing things and just being together.  It’s been nice so far.   

We went to a movie theater together today.  Did I mention we went together?  Both of us at the same time?  With no kids in tow?  To a real grown-up (well, sort of) movie, at the same time.  For the first time in EIGHT years.  It was so cool.  And yes, the movie was good too.  The Dark Knight.  Christian Bale is too hot for words.  And Heath Ledger’s Joker is one of the scariest characters I’ve ever seen on film.  

We’re going to do some work around here too.  Maybe.  And the Sonars will be back this weekend, just in time for Partner’s summer break to wind down.  He’ll head back to oppressing the masses in public education next week.  But for now, he’s just a guy I really like to hang out with.  Who gets recognized by every teenager in town when we go out.

Part Two

Hurricane Dolly is expected to make landfall near the Texas/Mexico border sometime tomorrow afternoon or evening.  This is good (for us) because it’s several hundred miles down the Gulf Coast from us.  It’s not so good for the people down around Brownsville and Harlingen who, though it’s not a big storm, are preparing for the worst and hoping for the best (I am hoping for the best for them too).  

We are on the rainy side of the storm (a tropical storm sucks up moisture on one side of its rotation, leaving that side miserably dry and hot, and dumps it, like a big rain machine, on its wet side—check here or here for everything you never wanted to know about tropical monsters).  Our last close call with a Storm was Erin 2007, which passed by us up the coast, leaving us on the dry side.  We have evacuated only once in the 3+ years that we’ve lived here, for Rita 2005 (you might have heard of her; she followed Katrina), though we ended up on her dry side too.

Dolly’s first rain bands have passed over us, though we’ve had no rain so far at our house.  The steady rain should start sometime tonight, and—if it goes as forecast currently—carry on through most of tomorrow and part of Thursday, leaving us several inches wetter and a bit blustered.  

When I first moved to this part of Texas, I was completely freaked out about Hurricanes.  I mean, seriously, growing up in New Mexico, severe weather was not a reality for me.  And even in Pennsylvania for several years, where we had to prepare for the occasional fierce winter storm, we didn’t worry too much as long as we had food and water.  We just put on our warmest jammies and stayed in bed until it was time to shovel snow.  We didn’t worry about whether the house would still be standing when the storm passed.  

I have better perspective on things now.  First, a house is just a house.  If it blows down, well, as long as we’re safe, our lives will go on.  It’s just stuff.  So we do what is appropriate for any given storm (boarding up windows, for instance, if it’s a stronger storm, hoarding food and water and batteries if we’re going to hunker down; packing a kit of essential papers and belongings if we’re going to evacuate).  Preparing for the worst, and hoping for the best, and generally trying not to panic or overreact.  Second, a hurricane doesn’t exactly sneak up on you.  It’s not a tornado, that can pop up and surprise you.  It’s a big lumbering beast of a storm, and with modern data and forecasting, we always know when they’re coming, and within a few hundred miles, where they’re coming, and approximately how strong and what kind of damage they might do.  

That said, knowing the kids are out of the inland path of the storm also makes me worry less about this one.  When we evacuated for Rita, I had an infant with an ear infection and no pharmacies open within a hundred miles able to fill his antibiotic prescription.  Though the storm was starting to track up the coast, evacuation had been recommended and in a post-Katrina frenzy, that evacuation of the Texas coast was, well, let’s say less than orderly and ideal.  But evacuate we did, in order to make sure the littlest Sonar could get some relief and that the other Sonars could be in a safe place no matter what happened.  

This time, I know they’re safe.  No one has an ear infection.  In fact, I know they’re having a good time, swimming, making rock candy, watching trashy tv, and eating junk food with grandma.  That assurance makes it easy for me to sit in the front yard with Partner, sipping a beer, secure in the notion that we can handle a storm.  

Now, if only we managed to put together a couple of rain barrels ahead of the rain.

Just go watch

It’s very funny.  I promise.  

Still Nothing

I love these teas.  The peachy Black Tea is my favorite, with the Energizing Black running a close second (oooh, but the Chai is good too).  Besides their amazing depth of flavor, the cool company vibe, and the bald little old man who used to be on the box, I love the quotes on the tea tags.  

Each tag has some pithy quote on it.  

“The palest ink is better than the best memory.  —Wise Saying from the Orient

“The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.”  —Mark Twain

I love them so much that for a while, I kept my tags every day and entered them on my googlepage.  (Aside:  that rose was in my front yard, on a bush that has now expired, which is a bummer because it was such a lovely coral color and it smelled great too.)

Now you can go talk amongst yourselves about how crazy I am.  Go on.  It’s ok.  I already knew.  

Next:  Who says I can’t blog while on vacation?

Jelly Dungeon

We had breakfast for dinner tonight.  A someone-in-this-house-was-born-in-a-Southern-state dinner of biscuits, sausage, milk gravy, and eggs (do these parents ever feed their children fruit or vegetables?).  I can’t even remember what we were talking about.  The conversation meandered around for a while, and somewhere Sonar X5 popped off with that phrase.  

Jelly Dungeon.  With giggles on top. 

He was just being silly.  Rhyming or stream-of-consciousnessing or something.  But I love the phrase.  What could a Jelly Dungeon be?

Partner suggested an irc chatroom for people with food fetishes (a whole other kind of foodie).

I thought of a sticky, secret basement room.  

‘Jelly’ is such a wholesome word.  Sweet, good to eat with peanut butter or on a hot biscuit.  ‘Dungeon’ conjures other, more punishmenty or at least dark things.  Put them together and what do you get?  Bippity, bobbity, boo.  

What’s in your Jelly Dungeon?

P.S. I’m making a turtle.

Stash Toss

I may have mentioned that I have too many hobbies.  I sew—clothes, quilts, household goods, toys, costumes.  I knit—socks, lace, sweaters, toys, apple jackets.  I make crafty little weird things from time to time.  I encourage my children to do the same.  Their projects often involve small pieces of wood and copious amounts of scotch tape and glue.  And also sometimes paint.  I write—yes, I think right now this counts as a hobby, so seldom do I do it, but I aspire to shift this from hobby to, well, to something more involved at some point.  Oh, and I used to be a runner, and hope someday to be one again.  

That doesn’t count reading, which isn’t so much a hobby as a need.  And cooking, ditto need.  And gardening, which truthfully doesn’t involve me as often as it does Partner, but I’m there in a pinch.  

Each of these activities has accumulated stuff.  Reading: books.  Gardening:  uh, dirt, and vegetables, gloves, tools, blisters.  Knitting:  yarn, needles, scissors, patterns.  Sewing: boxes and boxes of fabric, and stuffing, elastic, buttons, snaps, velcro, thread, patterns and two sewing machines (ok, one is a serger and I haven’t actually used it successfully yet, but I’m hopeful).  

The craft stuff has filled an entire closet in my house.  I’ve admitted to my yarn stash being fairly reasonable and modest.  After tossing the craft closet, the yarn now occupies two plastic file boxes and one plastic blanket bag.  The fabric is another story altogether—several bins, a couple of garbage bags, and slouchy stacks.  

All of this stuff wears down my brain.  Even when it is successfully crammed into the closet with the door shut, I know it is there, occupying space.  Making me feel guilty with the unfulfilled promise and possibility that all of those raw materials represent.  

Before his death, trying to finish one last album before cancer finished him off, Warren Zevon noted about his love of reading that buying new books does not buy the time it takes to read them.  Not the happiest thought, but it is a realistic assessment that each of us has only a limited amount of time in any day, week or life, and that the accumulation of stuff does not magically expand our hours.  

When I shop (which I really dislike doing), I often ask myself the basic question, ‘Do I need this?’  That’s fairly easy to answer, but harder often is the next question, ‘Do I have time for this?’  I can cascade from there into sub-questions about whether I’m willing to make time for something that I need or something that I will find fulfilling for other reasons.  This basic personal consumption questioning has helped to keep the stashes under some semblance of control.  

Fabric and yarn are difficult for me though.  I can see the possibility in every piece of fabric I have.  The things that I could make.  I have the skill, the creativity, the enthusiasm.  So when someone says, ‘Hey, I don’t need this fabric/these bedsheets/this old quilt/this yarn, would you like to have it?’  I often can’t say no, especially if they are walking to the trash can as they say it.  When the yarn or fabric is super-cheap, I often can’t say no.  But the generosity of neighbors, the lure of a good deal, the infinite possibilities that those materials could become, do not give me the extra time to actually use them.  

So, in the interest of simplifying my closets, life, brain/clutter distress, I tossed my craft closet last night.  I wanted to be firm.  I planned ahead.  I had decided to keep all yarn, but sort it (and, oh, did I find some of the flashiest, sluttiest red mohair yarn that I did not know I had—I would link to a pic, but it’s discontinued and I can’t find it online: Pingouin Panache Mohair.  I don’t even know where it came from.  Yarn fairies?  There are at least two lace scarves coming out of that).  I had decided to keep fabric that I like that would be useful in the creation of quilts (I will quilt again.  I will.  I feel a moral compunction here.  I made quilts for some friends/family for their babies, and feel certain that I will want to do the same again for future babies.  Also, my sonars are outgrowing their kid quilts, and one day I will want to make them growing-up quilts that fit their big bodies.)  I had decided to keep any garment fabric that was already cut or paired with a specific pattern.  In other words, I would finish what I’d started in there.  

Out the door I had planned to throw all other apparel fabric, all weird fabric, all upholstery fabric, all stinky fabric (I inherited a bunch of stuff from my grandmother’s garage), all ugly fabric, and any clothes that were beyond reasonable mending.  

The will is strong in theory and weak in the face of the actual stuff.  

As I started to unload the closet, I was struck by how much more stuff was in there than I realized.  It really was worse than I thought.  Some things were easy:  8 yards of stinky, yellow, knit terry cloth.  Gone.  Ditto the 50 yards of stinky, navy, woven terry.  I fudged a bit, keeping the old sheets because I thought they might make a good bottom layer for summer quilts.  I completely faltered at the fleece-lined neoprene.  I mean, seriously, I know it’s red and black, and I know I bought it for a ridiculously low price, but what if one of the Sonars needs a wet-suit one day?  I could make it!!  It could happen.  We do live on the coast.  Maybe one of them will become a surfer.  Or a kiteboarder.  

It was painful.  Two hours later I had two large trashbags full of fabric to freecycle.  Which is good.  But I really did want to get rid of more.  I am left with one giant bin full of quilting fabric (loosely defined).  A giant bin of various works in progress, and apparel fabric that I just couldn’t get rid of (the pink/orange/drapey Hawaiian print that my grandma bought a whole bolt of on vacation 800 years ago and which she begrudgingly shared 3 yards with me, among other things).  A smaller bin full of upholstery fabric, which is really just too handy and versatile to part with (and oh, what if I need drapes sometime?).  In there is also about half of the array of lining fabrics that I inherited from my mother-in-law (seriously, we could have lined anything to match.  The woman had collected everything from shell pink to blood red to chocolate brown to caramel paisley—I kept the caramel paisley).  There is a file box full of patterns.  Ditto a file box full of notions (which really needs its own toss, but I was too drained to do it last night).  

Remind me not to look in the garbage bags again before I get rid of it.  I might take stuff out.  

Do I have time now to knit the slutty red lace?