Crafty Goodness

Because it’s less than 50 degrees outside, V and I celebrated our indoor craftiness mojo yesterday. I bought this “silk-screening” kit sometime in July last year, during the 75%off toys Target sale (“silk screening” is in quotes because it’s really a fancy stenciling set-up. And I'd provide you with the name of the thing but I'm too lazy to get up to check). I bought all the additions, too, and spent less than $30 total (with an original retail price of $120…).  They came with unholy amounts of pink fabric paint,  but enough others to make it worth our while.  Because I'm essentially, as I mentioned earlier, lazy, we didn’t get around to using it until now.

 As a busty woman with an excess of gravity around me, I often have tops with annoying little stains on them. I thought stencils might be a good way to camouflage an otherwise perfectly good shirt. V occasionally gets persistent stains, too, but more often than not, I find her several thrift store t-shirts in boring solid colors. To encourage her artistic side, I let her pick her stencils, and the colors. She picked a turtle in green, a butterfly (“let’s make it a monarch!”), and most enthusiastically,  a boom box. Or, as she called it, a boom-boom-boom box.

 We had to mix the orange from the available red and yellow (hello, learning!) but it turned out orange-r than it looks here, I promise. Note to self: more yellow, less red next time.

I tried to get her to make a pink turtle, to use up some of that pink, but she would have none of it.

 Sadly, the monarch is already a touch small. New nightgown for cousin Emmy!

But the turtle and the boom box are pretty fantastic. The paint has a decent hand to it, not too stiff, and though sometimes it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped(those projects are not pictured, to protect everyone involved), I think this was a good first run.

Shedid, after all, wear the boom box to school today.

New garden

We got a new, raised-bed garden today. V helped fill it with a variety of types of dirt, and talked excitedly about what we would plant. "I like squash!" I don't know who taught her that; it wasn't us, but we'll be planting squash. Obviously.

"It's like we're farmers" she said.

 While I moved on to photographing fancy tulips*, V kept working the soil. Myra's gonna be so proud.

 And if you've gotta work the soil, you might as well wear cute shoes**. Right?

Like we're farmers, indeed.


*Upcoming post: stay tuned.
**Born maryjanes, from two or three years ago.

Mother's Day Loveliness

It rained. And rained.

But it wasn't terribly cold, and the kids were good, and the dogs weren't too crazy, and nobody got particularly pissed off. That's a good weekend at the lake, if you ask me.

When the sun did come out, the cousins were ready to soak it up.

After eight months away, it was good to come back to the lake, with so many people we love, and celebrate a brave, cancer-free mama/grandma/mama-in-law.

Beth and I found this very, very special carnation for her. And I think it really made her day complete.

Hope you're finding sunshine between the rainstorms this week. 

For my friend Meg

...who, each day, gets a little closer to bursting into bloom.

Quotes about Spring

Because the only words I can think of right now are swears.

"In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather

 inside of four and twenty hours." ~Mark Twain

"May is a pious fraud of the almanac." ~James R. Lowell

"Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems"~Rainer Maria Rilke

Welcome spring!

Oh, seasonally appropriate weather. We are so glad you've finally arrived.

We can't come back 'til the water goes down...

It's mostly subsided, now, this spring's flood. Floods are weird like that. Hurricanes, tornadoes, even blizzards only last a day or two at most. But a flood comes in and often stays for weeks. We live upstream from my hometown, so even a week after it crested here, Hendrum still waited. Eventually there was only one road open to get into or out of town. And even there, water for miles and miles.

The photo above was taken last week, after the crest, when Hendrum again had 4 roads in and out. It's the east side of Highway 75, for those of you who're from these parts. Yes, the east side. The side furthest from the river. It's not easy to be a farmer around here this spring, I imagine. Or a rat, or a deer, or a raccoon, probably. (didja see how I used the mirror to illustrate the vastness of the wateriness? huh? didja?)

V's a city girl, of course, and so we measure our floodwaters by roadsign. Here's the mighty Red, from about the same time, slowly going back down (that's a parking ramp on the right side of the photo). When V and I first checked, only the top two inches of the stop sign were visible. Then the whole sign disappeared, and after a few days it started peeking out again, bit by bit. It's been fun to have a concrete way to measure the rise and fall that didn't involve homes of dear friends. 

It's tiring, these floodwaters.  I'm glad they're going, and I hope they stay away awhile.

Easter festivities

Without vinegar, this totally lacked the smell of egg dyeing, but since we're not sure V can smell anyway, what the heck.

Nothing like putting on your Pearl Jam t-shirt and dyein' some eggs on Easter morning.

Kirigami

While I wait for students to arrive for the conferences they signed up for, I work on the 2004 Kirigami calendar I bought at Barnes and Noble for 75% off 7 years ago. It makes me feel productive and I kinda think it's magic.

Plus it keeps me from grading, which, currently, is my main objective.

Puzzling

V got this puzzle for Christmas from our friend Nancy. This is the third time we've done it: we discuss the Addams family while we work, and it's really fun.

And it brings up memories I had long forgotten. When I was a girl, my family LOVED puzzles. Every holiday, all winter, and just about any time was a good time for a puzzle. I have few memories of my grandfather, who died when I was 6, but many of them involve him hovering around a dining room table, working on a puzzle. We had three or four puzzles we did every Christmas, and it helped us bide our time while we waited to open presents.

But it wasn't enough to just do puzzles, for some reason. My dad had all kinds of elaborate rules for puzzles, and puzzle doing was serious business. These rules were non-negotiable, and though I didn't enforce them with V(except for #1), I felt bad for breaking each rule.

Dewey's rules for puzzles:

1. No food or drink on the puzzle table. At all. Ever. If you need coffee or a snack, get a TV tray and put it up next to the puzzle table. Then consume it over the TV tray, not the puzzle. Also, you'll have to listen to the story about when Grandpa Art spilled coffee on a brand new puzzle one year.

2. When we open a puzzle, and dump out the pieces, we have to flip over all of them before we put anything together. Every piece. When I was too little to really do much else with puzzles, this was often my job, and my family was all about the 1000 piece ones. It took for freaking ever.

3. If any of the pieces were left together from the last time this puzzle was done (my aunt Barbie was notorious for just folding a puzzle up to put it away) everything must be taken apart and spread out. Just two pieces together? One on each end of the table. More than that, and we had to mix them in. 

4. Everyone gets to look at the cover of the box once. Just once. When someone new comes to start work on the puzzle, they get to look at, but the rest of us who've already seen it are expected to avert our eyes. And then we talk about those crazy people who use the box to place individual pieces, and don't follow the other rules, either. Heathens.

5. If, when the puzzle is finished, there are pieces missing, we look around carefully to see if there're any on the floor. If not, we take a slip of scrap paper, slide it under the puzzle, and trace the missing piece. Then we write on the slip a description of what's missing (i.e. blue hippo eye, or Santa's left elbow). This precious slip goes into the puzzle box so we know what's gone for next time.

I sure wish he was here to teach these to V, though.  I'm a pushover when it comes to made up rules, it turns out. Somewhere he's hollering at us everytime we look at the box, I just know it. I hope he understands.

Riverside conversation

Myra: "I hope there isn't a squirrel living in that tree with a hole."

Jen: "If there is, I bet he's pissed."

V: "And angry. And wet."

Playground with Grandma

V has so little fear. She loves to run and climb and jump and leap, and when she falls, she laughs and runs some more. Grandma's the one who takes her to the playground the most often, and pushes the swings, and takes the pictures, and helps her dust off her pants when she hits the ground.

It's a pretty good deal for everybody, really.

When you live in an ancient lake basin...

My mother likes to talk about Lake Agassiz. Maybe it's because she's a former elementary school teacher, but it's a little embarrassing, actually, to bring friends home from college and have them get Myra's lecture on The Big Lake. But she's right. I know she's right everytime we leave this valley, and my ears pop like I'm on an airplane because I'm not used to the elevation.

So it surprises no one that our basement (hell, everyone's basement in the eleven county area) takes on water this time of year. I honestly don't know why so many of us have basements, even. And every year I swear I'm going to be ready for it, and every year I get pissed off when it shows up. Really, really pissed off.

Today, I cursed the rain, my basement, the people who built this house, the people who sold us this house, my realtor, the guy at Menard's who sold me a lousy 8 gallon wetvac, my grandparents for settling in this area, the length of my own pants, my dad for having a stroke instead of staying well and living long enough to help me with this crap, gravity, those disgusting little centipedes that curl up and die all over my basement, linoleum, the nasty consistency of wet cardboard, and Lake Agassiz.

(I emptied the wetvac 5.5  times in 20 minutes. That's right. 44 gallons of water. The first photo is of my basement, just an hour after I got rid of 44 gallons of water. The second photo is my damn stupid long pants.)

I know, geologically, that this is what we deserve. But it doesn't mean I have to like it.

Springiness

This winter, I bought a bag of silver forks at Savers. They'd been drilled through the handles, and two of the seven were attached to this heavy silver ring. Today, V and I attached the rest, fashioned a wire hanger, and put it up in the backyard, hanging off the clothesline. It sounds really lovely, though the wind has to blow pretty hard to move them. And I like being the kind of family that has seven forks hanging in our backyard.

In the front yard, despite our profound negligence, the tulips are still coming. I am deeply grateful for such persistence.

The slugs and other crawly things were enjoying the fruits of our lack of labor.

And V enjoyed the slugs and crawly things.

I think these are daffodils. This time of year, I'm so pleased with my past self for taking the time to plant flowers. Because I need inspiration something fierce this time of year.

I hope spring is coming to your neighborhood, too! 

Busy and Angry and Tired, oh my!

Busy: It's the last four weeks of the semester, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, that's right. It means I'm up to my neck in grading, the laundry's piling up, and the car needs washed. And yet....I want to blog. I want to frolic and share and love all of you, and piss on this giant stack of student papers. (Well, not literally. Once, when we had a black miniature poodle named Zuul with some anger issues, he peed on some student papers. Those were fun to hand back). It's funny how that works, isn't it? How just when we feel totally tapped out we seee something shiny and suddenly have all the energy we could want.

Angry:  Oh, lord, I'm angry at snow. I've never been mad at snow before, that I can recall, though probably I have. But it just.will.not.leave. It's filthy and grey and going to flood our river all to hell but it's taking its own sweet time.We still have 6' high piles all around. And just when the driveway is almost clear, we get another 7 inches. Even Shaun's getting in on this anger party: a couple of weeks ago he came home just furious at the weather. So we talk about moving, and watch a movie or two, and then spring finally shows up and we forget about moving until next winter. Gak. Stupid sneaky snow.

Tired: I'm tired of being busy and angry, I guess. I'm looking forward to my sabbatical but it still seems entirely abstract and far away. I want to set out a bird feeder, and cook something new, but mostly I just want to take a nap. And blog.

Anyway, what a depressing, whiny post! Here, I will offer you something to cheer you up. V had two birthday parties to attend on Saturday, and we made the gifts for both. Here's the second party, at our local bowling alley (bowling parties are fun! I'd never been to one before!). We made our friend Oscar Costumes on a Stick, and he let his guests show them off with him.

I think they were a success! And isn't this a much happier ending? I thought so.

Languishing's first ever video post.

Let's hope we don't break the internet.

Messy crafty goodness

 I've seen this online in several places, and my Aunt Barbie and her ilk have done this on occassion in their card making adventures. So V and I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

 We started with a cheap can of shaving cream, and filled a couple of cookie sheets. V made a few snowpeople and some sort of merengue.

Then we dripped food coloring, and used various utensils to swirl. We just used the basic food coloring in those cool little droppers, and plastic forks and spoons.

V had the red and orange, and I had the blue and green. Then we laid sheets of drawing paper over the top, and pulled them back to see what we had wrought.

 Then we scraped off the shaving cream, and enjoyed the magic we'd created. Again and again and again!  It was messy as hell, and fun, and V got a bath  afterwards and we lived happily ever after.

I'm sorry we don't have any pictures of the finished product, but you get the idea. And we had lots of fun.

Never Eat Shredded Wheat

I love mnemonic devices. Love. When Shaun and I were first dating, I bought my first vintage Samsonite suitcase (which is a whole nother series of posts. Lord), and it had the initials EP on it. We spent a good 45 minutes imagining what they may have stood for, and it's one of my fondest memories of our early courtship (The two I remember most are Elvis Presley and Edible Panties).

The other day, V was asking what direction we were driving, so I explained north, south, east, and west to her. And then I shared how I remember them: Never Eat Shredded Wheat. Now, V and I both enjoy the occassional shredded wheat, so she was not comfortable with this sentence. Today, she put the letters N  E  S  W up on our fridge and worked on new sentences.

No Easter? Soon winter.
Never eat soft wombats.
No, Edith. Say what?
Never eat singing worms.

She read each dramatically, especially the one about Edith, and we laughed and laughed and laughed.

I can hardly wait until we get to Every Good Boy Does Fine. What are your favorite mnemonic devices? And have you seen this helpful online tool?

Edited for spelling. Thanks, Cousin!