Rambling thoughts

The weather is warm, which is nice. It was so very cold last week, amazing how quickly it got warm. Steven and I washed the car and truck yesterday, and my car is so clean, it looks wonderful (well, the outside, the inside needs some work!) It is usually hard to get him to help with things, but he enjoyed washing the car, so that was a plus.

I am being encouraged by an old friend to write a book. Not the first time it's been suggested, but now I am seriously considering it. I write mainly essay type stuff, like this blog, so I am thinking of something like David Sedaris, although I am nowhere near as funny as he. I have to ponder this bit longer.

I have resolved, or at least postponed, the current issue with the neighbor who hates me. The house needs work and he is a complainer, so he calls the city, which has the power to write tickets and charge me fines. The solution for now was to get a building permit for repairs, and now I can proceed to buy material and paint and start work. But the building permit is good for six months (actually, I have six months to get started, nothing about how long I have to finish) so I have time to do it as I can afford it, I hope.

Last week was my brother's birthday. He would be 50 this year, if he hadn't died at 15. One of his old girlfriends is now a friend on Facebook, and I was very touched that she remembered him. He has been gone such a long time now, but I miss him still. And Daddy. And Tracey, every day.

I don't have enough to do at work, and it is frustrating. I have some things on my desk to deal with tomorrow, which is good. I am not sure what I would do without my work, probably go home to my mother. She has more than one house, so we wouldn't have to live together (we might scream at each other a lot). I am nearly always at peace there, so that might be nice. But that's because I don't have to deal with cranky neighbors and it is basically vacation. If I were there all the time I might not like it at all!

I love watching Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. He is actually a good interviewer, and will invite anyone on the show. He is funny and serious at the same time, which is very useful in diffusing any potential acrimony, and also disarms his more conservative guests. Colbert is great, too, but in a different way, because no matter who he interviews he maintains his faux Bill O'Reilly character, and those who get it are hilarious and the ones who don't are not sure what to say, which is in its own way hilarious too.

I have craft stuff everywhere, and really need to get organized. It's hard to get anything done when you have to spend time looking for things. The PTO at Steven's school is having a yard sale in a couple of weeks so I hope to get some stuff together to give to that, although I don't usually have anything that I don't want to keep!

Back to my mother, she likes to go places, and it is hard to know where she is at any given moment. She has a cell phone but only turns it on when she wants to make a call, so if she isn't at home, forget it. She is going to be spending time in a house with no phone, so I hope she starts keeping it turned on when she's there anyway.

I need to go to bed, I suppose, so enough of this. Good night.

My chair

This is the chair I redid. I painted it and covered the seat and back. I need to redo the seat, it is a little bunchy, but it's a comfortable chair and I didn't want to throw it out just because it had stains on the fabric. I hate to see still-useful stuff thrown away.

Time and musings

Wow, I hadn't realized it had been so long since I wrote here. I write my weekly (well, semi-weekly now) email for Drinking Liberally Charleston and have started administering a group for that on Facebook (where I can also be found). Then there is just life, catching up to me. My grandson Adam is having difficulties. I hate it, because I feel he has not been dealt a very good hand in life. That's trite sounding, but his father committed suicide when Adam was not quite 4, then we found out six months later that he has Type I diabetes, and on top of those things he has ADHD and suffers from depression. He may be bi-polar, too, but I don't know. He has difficulty getting along with his stepfather, and I can see both sides of that. Adam is a challenging child, but full of love and needing a lot of it. He is much like his father, and I have been trying to spend more time with him. I wish-I hope-he gets through all this.



I have been looking for and finding old friends, too. In a way I guess I am trying to make amends, or get things right that I didn't the first time. I feel that I haven't been a good friend to people; I let them go easily when I move forward, and that isn't a good thing. As I get older I miss spending time with other people, although I am the type of person who could become a hermit without much effort. But even though I am confortable going to movies or to eat alone, and reading books without discussions to follow, it would be nice sometimes to share those interests. And since I don't think I get to have a second life, maybe should make more of an effort. Unfortunately these old friends are usually far away. So I guess I should be trying to spend more time with local friends!



I took my first train ride and went to my first college bowl game this year. I loved the train, and want to take more trips, it was so relaxing. I think my son and I should take an actual vacation this year; we haven't done that for years, and he will be grown before I know it. I have to save for some house repairs, and a car, but I hope we can swing at least a long weekend trip somewhere besides my mother's house.



I like to do crafts, and have recently redone a chair. I sew, paint stuff, knit a little, crochet a little, various things. I have some lawn furniture that was my grandmothers' and plan to paint it this week, having finally found the color paint I want for it. I'd probably get more done if I didn't spend time on the computer! I only do a little bit of several things, not a lot of anything, so I don't get expert at anything! Oh, and I love to take pictures; my mom got a digital camera for me for 2007 Christmas and I love it! I take pictures everywhere I go. I love movies, especially old ones, TCM being my favorite all time television network, and new drama series, like Leverage and The Closer and Burn Notice.

Okay, now this is starting to sound like a personal ad, time to knock it off for the night. If you've read this far, sleep well.

President-elect Barack Obama

I am watching C-Span, and President-elect Obama just gave his acceptance speech. Once again, as he has done throughout this campaign, his speech wasn't about him. It was about us, about the United States of America. And as the families of President-elect Obama (I just love writing that!) and Vice-President-elect Biden came out on the stage, and as I watched the faces of the people in the crowd, it wasn't a black and white America I saw. It was every color, every race, every nationality that makes up our country. I saw families who obviously love each other on the stage, two couples who genuinely love each other. And men who love this country, and who will do their very best for all of us. I cried tonight when the results were announced. All the pent up nervousness I had suffered over the last few weeks just released itself, because despite the attacks, despite the vicious emails, the robocalls, the truly despicable campaign run by the Republican campaign machine, Americans had elected a man they had witnessed over the last two years remain unflappable, unstoppable, and dedicated to the belief that in this country, anything is possible.
Even as he began his speech, Obama was more gracious in victory than I could have been toward John McCain. I am not one of those people who used to love McCain, I never even liked him much, but even I had been stunned lately by the way his campaign was run. I even checked the comments on FoxNews.com, and the racism I read there was awful. I am not talking about any kind of code words; I am talking "did they really think a black man could ever become President?" That isn't about Barack Obama's politics, or his positions, or his policies; this is about his skin color. And America is better than that.
Or we will be. Give us four years.

Chores and musings

I have a willow chair, or rattan, or whatever it is. I'm thinking it's willow, but anyway, it needs refurbishing. I got the seat off okay, and it is ready to recover. But the back is giving me fits. It is a padded and upholstered piece of cardboard stapled into the opening, and the staples are really hard to get out. I want to paint the chair, so I need to sand it (my cats were using it for a scratching post), and before I do any of that the staples have to come out, so I can recover it with the fabric I have chosen. I am thinking I will paint it purple, since I already have the paint and it will match my (future) bedroom colors. I have a green fabric for the seat and back, because I love those colors together. The purple I have is a lighter shade, not quite lavender, and the green is a sagey color, so they will go well together. I am using wire cutter pliers at the moment, and they are hurting my hands, but it will be okay. I need to find a staple remover.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, nothing really, but I am avoiding something and that is when I get stuff done. I have written a blog already about what I'm avoiding, but won't publish it at this point. So the chair is a substitute. And it also is about reusing, reordering, getting my house in order. Nesting, in a sense.
More about this later.

Food and mothers and home

Food links us to our past and provides context in our present. Tonight I cooked corn, grown by my mother on land that has belonged to my father's family for over 60 or so years. My uncle plowed the land, my mother planted the seed and hoed the rows and watered the corn (not to mention the other vegetables she grows) and when it was time she picked it, shucked it and cut it off the cob, to be placed in the freezer until I retrieved it, brought it the 200 miles or so from Abbeville to North Charleston and cooked it in a cast iron frying pan, the way she has done for these 50 some odd years. In another pan, a birthday gift from my father thirty some years ago, I browned hamburger for tacos, a food never served in my childhood home. I sliced and diced tomatoes, grown in that same garden and picked by me two days ago. And I ate the tacos, with the tomatoes on top, and the corn in a plate that once held food prepared by my father's mother, my granny, grown on that same land. This was an obvious link to the past.
Just now, I finished squeezing the pulp from a big bowl of muscadines, picked by me, my mother and my aunt from vines in her pasture, two days ago. I put the hulls in freezer bags, ready for pie, and the pulp in another, ready for cooking into juice for jelly. They wait now in my freezer, linking the future to the past and to today. None of this is important, of course. It's just food, after all.
But here's the thing. I know where the corn and the muscadines and the tomatoes grew. I know who tended the plants, who watered and hoed and cared for them. And more than that, those are the foods of my childhood. My grandparents, my mother's parents, had a farm too, although it has passed out of family hands now. There were muscadines and scuppurnongs and figs and pears and apples in late spring and early fall. Green beans, corn, butterbeans, crowder peas, okra, squash, all grew there. In the spring there were strawberries. And in summer, tomatoes, glorious red full-flavored tomatoes, like nothing you buy in the store, and with apologies to all those Johns Islanders, like nothing I ever got from there. My mother still grows those things, and she has introduced fruits to my father's farm that weren't there before, the apples and plums and figs. Her pear tree this year is full of green pears, which are crisp and sweet and juicy in your hand as you take big, crunchy bites of them, fresh from the tree. And the pecan trees are loaded with green hulled pecans, waiting for the colder weather to turn brown and drop from the tree, ready for pies and cakes and toppings for the sweet potatoes she is now digging from the garden. I can eat home grown food every day of my life. I know when certain foods are in season and when their growing time has passed and it is time to eat from the freezer or the jars.
I don't really have a point here, I guess, unless it is that we are too accustomed to food in packages and cans, in neat little bins in the produce section. We forget whether they grow in the ground or on a vine, on a bush or a tree. We don't know what pesticides or herbicides are used to facilitate their growth, and how that leaches into the groundwater. I don't shop at Whole Foods, I shop from my mother's garden, and I am wealthier for it. My father used to talk about how much it cost to grow all this stuff, but he never stopped growing it. My mother keeps doing it. And one day I hope to grow food in that same earth. Meantime, I love that I can eat it.

Celebrity?- My Barack Obama Ad 8/3/08