Pinterest is the Devil

I'm sick.  I've been sick for several days, and I am never sick.  Unless I get ahold of a bad oyster, or more likely, bad gin.  But I am well and truly sick this time, and I don't like it.  I don't like doctors either, which presents its own quandaries.  Any hoo, I decided it was the better part of valor to stay home - to skip that meeting,  to NOT finish cleaning out the garage, and to put off starting those tomato seeds.  Again.  Instead, I thought I'd try to work on something simple, like crocheting a dishcloth.  Nothing overly involved, mind you, just your garden-variety dishcloth.

And after searching on Ravelry (love) and other yarn-manufacturer sites, I couldn't find what I wanted. (It's a dishcloth, you might say.  Shut up, I might say).  My friend, Mary, was on Pinterest the other day looking for some pattern or another, and I thought, hmmm.  Maybe I'll just hop other there real quick and see if there's something dishcloth-y over there.

Now, I've heard of Pinterest.  I see people's pins on Facebook.  Not interested.  I'm far too busy doing things like cooking and gardening and crocheting and canning and knitting to spend anytime sitting around looking at stuff on the internet.  I am waaaaay too important, too capable to need the internet to drive my creativity. I am WOMAN! But nevertheless a woman who needed a catchy dishcloth pattern.  Plus, the septic guy was here to pump the system out, so I was in a hurry. (Did you know methane gas actually EATS the concrete of your septic tank from the INSIDE?  Turns out it does.  This is not good news).

Hence, a brief search for a crochet dishcloth pattern on Pinterest.  Which I logged onto for the first time at 3:38.  It is 7:52, and I have only left my chair to get a glass of wine (2 times), make soup (1 time), and blow my nose (76 times).  I have ended up in the weirdest places and the greatest places.  I now have so many potential projects that the 21-day GYST Challenge may have to be changed to the 21-year GYST challenge. I will be 66 years old and riddled with Alzheimers, but my yard will be PERFECT.

The downside, however, is that it is, after all, the Internet.  Anyone with software can post something somewhere that will at some point end up a search result on Pinterest.  If it's kitchen cabinets and handy gardening tips, Pinterest is your place.  It's amazing.  If it's "homemade cold remedies", however, let me just tell you that a disturbing number of people have pinned a horrifying photo of a glass quart Mason jar that appears to be filled with garlic cloves, horseradish, apple cider vinegar (Hey, Manny), and the toes of baby snow leopards.  You.  Can. Not.  Tell.  Me.  that people are actually making this shit.  Not to mention drinking it.  Really?  Bonjour, indeed.

Gotta go.

Really Good Siblings

See that coffee cup there?  The one with the really cute red elephants on it?  My brother got that for me.  But, as my sister-in-law said, he paid his pound of flesh for it.  Again, this is not my story but his (he gets ALL the good ones).

First of all, I blame my new best friend Lucy.  Lucy does wonderful things with crochet and flowers and crafts and all that.  But what Lucy also does is drink tea.  Lovely, warm, brown English tea.  And since Lucy does it, so should I.  So, for most of this winter, I have been enjoying a nice tea break every afternoon before the kids get home.  And I've been drinking the last of the best. tea. ever.  It came from our last trip to England in 2010, and I have HOARDED it to make it stretch.  My recent bout of afternoon tea, however, has depleted my stores completely.  I tried and tried to find a suitable replacement, but no.  Even the fancy blenders at Austin's Tea Embassy (awesome, awesome tea shop - you should go there) couldn't match it. Devastation had set in.

And then!  After the kids' dentist appointment!  At my brother's house!  On the calendar!  "J. to London."  Could it be?  Is it possible?  YES!  So, I immediately texted him demanding that he go to Harrod's (the biggest department store in England) two weeks before Christmas and find me that tea.  I'm not even sure I said "please."

So, he did.  Why?  I'll never know.  I was absolutely frightful to him for most of my (and his) adolescence.  According to my little nephew, I still "boss [his] daddy around an awful lot." I am really, really sorry that I was so awful.  I'm even more sorry because that sweet boy went to Harrod's for me on the busiest shopping day ever and got my tea for me.  And there was a buy two tins of tea, get a free mug deal (who knew?), so I got this precious, pretty mug.  AND not just because of that.

Also because the tea I like comes in a nice little tin container.  One that happens to look an awful lot like a bomb.  Especially when there are two.  And you're a tall, bearded man with no checked luggage on a short-stay flight from England.  So, there he is in line at the TSA on his connecting flight to Chicago with some very nervous security guys eyeballing him.  They call him over and ask him a harrowing number of questions, including:

TSA:  What's this?  What are these?
J:  It's tea.
TSA:  Is that so?  (looking inside)
J: Yes
TSA: (pause) Oh.  And what's THIS?
J:  Cheese
TSA: Cheese?
J: Yes

You see, the best part of this story is that the only other thing J brought back from England with him was a really, really stinky wedge of cheese that his friends always send back for my sister-in-law.  The TSAs had no idea what to do with that situation.

So, they did the only natural thing.  They swabbed the cheese for explosives.

I shit you not.

Happy Birthday, Bub.

GYST Report, Day 10

Get Your Shit Together Report
(a/k/a Damn You, Australian Open)

Day 10

There's something uniquely mortifying about setting a goal for yourself and failing at it.  Publicly.  But there it is.  For those of you following along, I had two pieces of bread and butter, two slices of bacon and some pound cake for dinner last night.  My trainer at my gym keeps telling me that food is 80% of weight loss.  No kidding.  I have been pretty vigilant about my exercise, so that's a mercy.

As far as projects go, it seriously seems like I am doomed.  I have terrible sinus from allergies (waahh). The Australian Open is on (hooray).  These two things combine to equal staying up way too late and waking up with a raging headache.  Those to things necessitate getting the kids off, taking seventeen Advil, and going back to sleep until I can hold my head upright.  Those three things conspire to prevent me from getting a full day's work in.  I can get the day-to-day done, but anything extra is cast to the winds.  And I'm serious.  In 10 days, I've finished a scarf.  That's it.  And it was 7/8ths done to start with.

Part of the problem, too, is that I'd rather do fun stuff.  Like bake.  A dear friend's dad died this past weekend, so I wanted to take a little something by.  So I baked bread, made two different kinds of muffins, and canned some strawberry jam.  Like some kind of crazy, manic pioneer, I sweated and stewed over all this business.  And it was great.

But great don't refinish the dining room chairs.  You don't have dining room chairs, you ask? Of course I do.  I have the crazy modern chairs that went with my old dining room set before I got my grandmother's George Jetson cherry table.  Last summer, yes, that would be the summer of 2011,( I prefer to call it last summer because it makes me feel better),  I bought some fabulous chairs.  They are the perfect shape, if a little beat up, and the price was right.  I was going to immediately go home, give them some TLC, change the chair pads, and voila, they'd be perfect!  They're still in the garage.  Nineteen months later, they've moved from the shed to the garage.  And they only moved there because we tore down the old shed and built a new one.  All in the time since I bought the chairs.  Damn it.

And that's not the worst part.  This weekend, I went to see my darling, dear friend from high school, who in addition to a great farm and beautiful taste has an antique business on the side.  When we went by to see the place, there were the most perfect chairs for my dining room.  Almost as perfect as the chairs I already bought.  And I almost bought them.  It's like some kind of sickness.

I think it's time to get moving.  I've only got 11 more days.

Better hustle.

Cosmic Riddle

Why is it that no one is able to put the new roll of toilet paper on the handy spring loaded roller? That is sitting right next to you. Why?

Ode to a Kitchen Table

A friend of mine who is a priest in Los Angeles posed a question on Facebook the other day.  He asked what object represented intimacy, not sexual intimacy, but the intimacy that comes from being in relationship with someone for a long time.  He was working on a sermon about something that I didn't pay attention to, but the question struck me.

And I immediately knew what my answer was.  The object that represents relational intimacy to me most is a kitchen table.  Certainly some specific kitchen tables, including my own, but also the kitchen table of history and of life.

First night of semester exams

We never hung out at the kitchen table much when I was growing up -- the breakfast room was back in a corner of the house, there wasn't much going on in the kitchen in the first place, and the dining room table was reserved only for holiday dinners, when my grandparents came to town, and the mail.  But in my house, the kitchen table is the center of all things.  It may be because I don't allow food upstairs.  It may be because I don't allow television during the week or the computer is down here or there's a comfy couch nearby for reading.  It may be because our kitchen table is where everybody is together most of the time.  It may be because my children can't go ten feet inside a door without dropping their shit everywhere and that's the closest place.  Who's to say?

But for whatever the reason, everything gets done at the kitchen table.  Eating, talking, crafts, projects, and homework, lots and lots of homework over the years.  And it makes me happy.  G has a desk in her room and does her fair share of cocooning, but usually only on the weekends.  S has never had a desk and when asked if she wanted a cool piece of furniture to use as a pull-down desk, she said she'd never use it because she always does her homework downstairs.

The table is where our family is a family.  And although T is gone most of the week, what I find deeply moving is that his place is always laid with a napkin (when there are any) and his place is always cleared.  The kids usually don't dump their books and papers there.  They'll dump their stuff on my place, but I'm around to clean it up.  Daddy's place is sacred.  I love that.  It's like the empty chair for Elijah at a Jewish Seder.  Keeping his place means he's always with us, even when he's away.

And I deeply love this table, too.  I especially love it when no one is here.  It's cleaned off and the napkins (when there are any) are folded.  And there are several more hours that it will stay that way because no one is here.  It is a place of infinite possibility:  newspaper reading, emailing, writing, reading, coffee drinking making to-do lists and including things you've already done so you can cross them off.  Wait.  What?

Kids' first day back to school a/k/a hooray!

And I love other people's kitchen tables, too.  My stuffy Florida grandmother's kitchen table had a butter dish that you were forbidden to get crumbs into - hello, butter knife!  But I can still smell the heavy scent of my grandfather's dark rye bread on all those summer mornings.  My mother-in-law's kitchen table has seen any number of looooong family gatherings - we are outgrowing her small apartment now that our kids have become adult-sized, but that table carries so many wonderful memories.  And it will continue to.

My best friend's kitchen table is a huge round, but we always sat right next to each other and drank coffee on those endless mornings when our kids were little and sucking the souls out of us.  We drank coffee and talked about what we would do and where we would go when we didn't have toddlers.  New York!  Paris!  New Orleans!  Who cares?!  And now, we don't have toddlers anymore.  And our oldest ones are starting to figure out their college choices.  But the table that was once a life raft may well be again, for a different reason.

And that's okay.

I think.

GYST Day Three

Get Your Shit Together Report

Day Three

I had some wonderful friends over for a first annual "crafty hour" at which no one crafted a single thing.  We just ate and talked and had a delicious new cocktail from DAC, which, if I understand the story correctly, was supposed to be a Moscow Mule, but went wrong somewhere in Outer Mongolia.  Whatever it was, it was yummy.

So, nothing crossed off the list unless you count keeping dear friends nearby as something you put on a list.  

Maybe I should!

GYST Day Two

Get Your Shit Together Report

Day Two (Tuesday):  Seriously, this was one of those days.  Not a bad one, just one with lots to do outside the house.  Still, I did cross one thing off the list today:  "Meals for A."  My sister-in-law, whom I adore, may or may not have thyroid cancer.  She was having half of her thyroid out Tuesday, so I've been making yummy things for us for a week and doubling up for her.  That way, she can take it easy.

I went out early on the worst, coldest, drizzliest day to have a delightful birthday lunch with my super bff, L, and then off to deliver meals in Round Rock.  Threw the dinners in her freezer and sat down for a visit.  A is a trooper, and the good news is that everything looked good after the surgery.  And the even better news is that we had a lovely visit with A, my mother-in-law, and A's mother.  It was nice to slow down, have a coffee, and chat on a cold day like that.

Now, a visit wasn't on my list, and I stayed much longer than I'd intended, but those are the times that make a life.  I'm not going to sweat it; in fact, I'm going to embrace it.

Family matters.