Theory of Profanity

I'm blogging off Julie (Samurai Knitter) today - this started out as a comment, and as I typed, I realized it was so long it might as well be a blog post.

My Theory of Profanity is a little different. I guess it boils down to "Words Have Power," and some words, particularly profanity, acquire more power the less you use them.

I am generally known as a person who doesn't swear, but that's not really true. I don't swear much on my blog, but I'm a person who fixes broken stuff: believe me, nothing gets a stuck bolt unstuck like a fiery blue streak of profanity.

I've said in various places that I swear so seldom, when I do, lightning flashes, the earth trembles, and large men cringe.

My theory is, in order to have power, the words need to build up a charge. If I used them all the time, it would get zapped away in little static-sparks. The long in-between times when I'm not swearing let them build up some hefty voltage. Then when I do - ZAP!

My Jetsons Moment

I read Julie's post the other day, and when I turned on some music this morning, I remembered I had a Jetsons moment of my own to share.

My husband got me an mp3 player last November, and very shortly I remembered how much I dislike headphones, earbuds, and every other kind of in or on the ear sound thing. I notice them all the time. They just drive me wild.

So I kept an eye out, and a while ago I bought a pair of capsule speakers for the mp3 player:



This black matte egg separates into two little pop-up speakers that sit by my knitting spot.

I grew up in the Age of Big Stereo: big turntables, big speakers. In my head, a small stereo is a boom box.

To have a stereo sound system that fits on one hand . . . wow. Definitely a Jetsons moment.

URL Alphabet Meme

URL Alphabet Meme, via Denise at Jejune's Place.

You know how your web browser can auto-fill in a URL for you as you start typing? Here's what comes up in my browser for each letter.

A: Area Forecast Discussion from the local weather service office
B: Google Books, no surprise there!
C: The home page of the aforementioned NWS office
D: Blogger Dashboard
E: US Geological Survey Earthquake page 5.0 and over
F: Facebook
G: Google
H: The page of the local Freecycle group I co-moderate
I: Google Images
J: A local webcam looking out on the channel into Lake Michigan
K: The weather station (are you seeing a pattern here?) of a local airport
L: The Girl Genius livejournal site
M: Yahoo Mail
N: North Central US weather radar
O: Home page of Origins Game Fair
P: Discussion page of a Ravelry group I frequently read
Q: The earthquake page again (see E)
R: Ravelry!
S: The webcam from J
T: Twitter
U: Another Ravelry group page
V: The Vaisala Humidity Calculator
W: Another weather page
X: XKCD
Y: YouTube
Z: A friend of mine on Twitter

Since I Last Wrote...

I saw a bit of the 65th Revival AAA Glidden Tour.

This is the shared parking lot of the Blue Star Antique Pavilion and the Saugatuck Brewing Company just off exit 36 of I-196 on the way to Douglas, Michigan.

My husband's homebrewing club often meets here, and I have spent the odd happy hour wandering up and down the aisles of the antique pavilion and exploring the many many booths.

I just loved the contrast between these two cars and had to get a shot of them together.

I finished the little Niebling I started. The booklet describes the designs on this page as "dreieckiges" (triangular), but this one wanted to be round.To me it looks like something inspired by Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. It's a little thing, 50 rounds or so, under 8 inches across.

Then I started another, Glöckchen, because these things are like Terry Pratchett books: even when I know what happens, I still have to work my way through and see how everything works out.

Friday the weather was beautiful, warm and sunny, so we went to the Frederik Meijer Gardens to see the Chihuly exhibit and the Art Prize pieces.

(And I will stamp my foot here and say this was all built after we moved out of Grand Rapids, otherwise I would probably work there.)

On the way, from the highway we saw a bit of the work being done on St. Adalbert's. We used to live near it, and the copper roofs have always been green, so it felt odd to see them all shiny and coppery.

When you walk into the lobby at the gardens, this is what you see on the floor:

The floor is all covered with these organic-looking bronze shapes embedded in terrazzo. This is the work of Michele Oka Doner, Beneath the Leafy Crown, installed this year.

All three of us have been to the gardens before, but I think it's always been in the spring, for the butterfly exhibit. This was our first fall visit.

My mom took our son to see some of the Art Prize works in Grand Rapids, and we saw some more here at the gardens (scroll down the right sidebar), but I didn't get pictures of any of them!

Instead I got lots of pictures of Chihuly glass and really big plants.

The sun splashed out on the orange glass in this one, but I took it anyway, trying to get the bridge in the background for scale. Then the woman in turquoise walked into the shot, and I took it. Look how HUGE those leaves are.

I love the tropical house, and our son did, too. I had a great time going through there with him, because he kept noticing things like the live finches flying overhead, and asking about different plants.

And then we went to the carnivorous plant house, and the arid plant house, and then outside. It was awesome.

If you've been reading Girl Genius, you'll appreciate my last picture:
Look at the fangs! EEEEEE!

Bitten by the Domesticity Bug

This doesn't happen often, this attack of domesticity.

I got up and knitted for an hour before coffee. I'm up to row 93 of chart D on Lilac Time.

Then I made coffee, knitted a bit more, and apparently went into hyperdrive.

The child woke up and ate some breakfast. He is reading Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, and said something about fire lizards. I said, "Ha, for a second I thought you said butter lizards."

Instantly he imagined and began telling me the Natural History of the Butter Lizard, what it looked like, how much butter it ate, and how it got into the butter. Fascinating.

Since he was out of his bed I stripped it and stuffed sheets and light laundry into the washer.

I did a water exchange in the tank of the ailing orange fish and fed both fish. We fed dogs. I put fresh sheets on the bed, carried the clean laundry outside in the sun, and hung it on the clothesline.

I ran the washer through its Clean cycle. I got online and did some moderating on a couple of Yahoo groups. I read Girl Genius.

We had some lunch. I went outside and got the mail and the newspaper, then I ended up pulling myrtle that's trying to take over the lawn for over half an hour. (Really, how does the stuff get everywhere so fast?)

Then I went inside and made a batch of bread. While it rose, I washed and washed and washed dishes.

Oh, yeah. The dishwasher broke a couple of weeks ago. It needs a new drain solenoid. I ordered a new drain solenoid. It hasn't come yet.

Then I baked the bread and read the paper and went for a walk outside with the kid until black flies drove us indoors.

I hate black flies.

The weather is gorgeous. It's gorgeous outside, sunny, with a mild breeze. Flowers are blooming, leaves are just starting to expand, and it's lovely to be outside.

I really hate black flies. Thank goodness for window screens.

I went out and snatched the laundry off the line to fold indoors. Now I am really, really tired, and the house smells great. Fresh bread and clean sheets.

Oh, yeah, and a dog that apparently caught something in the grass right next to the fence and has gas that would fell an ox.

The Blue Cow's Tale

Everyone seems to like the blue cow, so I thought I'd tell what I know of her story.

She started out as one of those fiberglass art project cows. She might have been one of the Cows on Parade in Chicago back in 1999. The owner of Sherman's Dairy Bar bought her after the show was over, and for years she stood inside the brown garage door next to the entrance to the dairy bar. I remember her as white with flowers and leaves painted on her.

A couple years ago she showed up on the roof, painted blue-moon-ice-cream-blue, with a cowbell around her neck (and chains and a padlock to keep the wind or vandals from carrying her away).

They tell the kids "That's where Blue Moon ice cream comes from!"

She stands up there all year round, and in the winter I've often thought I should get a picture so I could say it was so cold even the cows turned blue.

I just found out that Sherman's has a Facebook page.

Since we're local, we usually go to Sherman's on rainy stormy days. The lines are shorter then, and that's when you'll find old farmers and their wives in there, enjoying a waffle cone and the flowers on the table.

2009 Year in Review

The last couple years, I've done a year in review with the first post from the month. This time I thought I'd take either my favorite or a representative post.

January 2009: Catching Up

February 2009: Why I Love it Here. (I snagged this picture from a Lake Michigan webcam that hasn't been updating lately.)

This past winter was so snowy!

March 2009: Stuff I Have Not Shown You

April 2009: The End is Near

May 2009: Dancing Bear Falls Off the Ball
Unfortunately, that was the theme for most of the summer.

June 2009: Aftermath
The June thunderstorms that took down many of our big trees and left us without electricity for almost four days.

July 2009: Stash Enhancement and a Single Perfect Rose
This post title is so characteristic of me, my life, and how my mind works I could almost eat it.

August 2009: Mooshky Madness!

September 2009: A Sampler Post

October 2009: A Puddle of White Lace
(Blogtoberfest made it really hard to choose one post!)

November 2009: Let me 'splain

December 2009: Aliens!

Oh, No I Don't!

I was reading an article the other day, and later when I went to work I was still thinking about it.

It doesn't matter what it was about, because basically what it was about was fear. What it boiled down to was the article said, "Here is another thing to be afraid of, here is why it is scary, booga booga booga booga booooooo!"

And why I was still thinking about it is that I don't need any help being afraid. I have one of those five-alarm adrenal systems that goes off with lights and sirens and big red fire engines for any teeny change in my life.

When I was a kid, my heart rate would go up if I had to wait at a different bus stop. I do not need anything new to worry about.

I can already take the stuff that I know about farming and pesticides and herbicides and the water table and soil micro-organisms and fungi and extrapolate, and keep myself up nights.

I read a lot. So with about five minutes' head start, my little rabbity mind can be running zigzags in the brambles about pretty much any subject you can think of, "Oh no oh no oh no oh no!"

A person can go crazy living like that.

Fortunately I discovered walking and meditation and drawing and poetry at an early age.

More on that tomorrow!

What A Week!

Monday I borrowed my dad to try and help me fix a problem we are having with our well. We have water, but the water pressure in the house is low. Dad says, having gotten an unexpected cold shower, that the pressure in the well pit is great. We still have some more adventures coming with that one.

To brighten the day up, I found that April at The Weaving Inn had drawn my name! Thanks, April!

Tuesday while our homeschooled son was taking the math section of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP), the elementary school secretary was counting up absences. She said they had 22% out absent Monday, and if they hit 25% they would have to close the school.

Sure enough, that evening I read on a news website that the school district was closing until Monday the 26th. The public library was also closed, and is supposed to re-open today.

Wednesday my new glasses (my first bifocals) came in. I am getting used to the lenses pretty fast, but I need to get the new frames adjusted, ow ow ow!

Thursday I was woken in the night by Truffles, having one of her periodic spells of midnight anxiety, panting bad dog breath in my face for no reason I could figure out. I ended up dozing on the couch with her until daylight. Later in the day I fixed the kitchen faucet that had been dripping for a while.

Friday we drove up to Grand Rapids in the rain after dropping my husband's car off for maintenance. (I drove, since his car was in the shop.) We did some fun fancy grocery shopping, had brunch, and saw my 14-month-old niece and my parents' recently-adopted grayhound.

On the way home, we picked up the car, and my husband and son went home. I went bookstore-browsing, and after looking through a shelf of mushroom guides, I think our earthstar is most likely Scleroderma polyrhizum, formerly known as Scleroderma geaster. (Better picture here.)

None of the Geastrum spp earthstars are big enough, and I was amused to find this thing in a genus with the poison pigskin puffball, Scleroderma citrinum.

Then I was further amused, after noticing that Scleroderma was in the order Boletales, to read the first part of Michael Kuo's article, The Evolution of a Great-Big Headache: "Understanding" Mushroom Taxonomy and Phylogeny.

You don't have to read the whole thing (although he has some fascinating comments about our old buddies Linnaeus and Fries). I'll quote the best part here:

I understand so little of DNA science that I have no choice but to accept unconditionally what the experts hand down. Last month, I thought that DNA sequencing for mushrooms involved injecting rabbits with something from the mushroom and then sending something else that comes out of the rabbits to a big laboratory somewhere. I told all my friends. This month, reading different articles, the rabbits are gone. ...

I mention this rabbit-thing to emphasize my infantile understanding of molecular biology, but I promise I didn't make it up; see for example Jung et al. (1993), an experiment reaching important conclusions about morel taxonomy, in which methods included the following: "Rabbits were bled from their marginal ear vein [sic] to obtain preimmune sera"; and my personal favorite, "100µl of goat-antirabbit immunoglobulin antiserum coupled to horseradish peroxidase . . . were added to each well and incubated"

That has to be my personal favorite, too.

Today (Saturday) the public library was open, so the child and I went up and got the books we had on hold, and then I finally got my painful frames adjusted.

Then we came home and my copy of Susanna Lewis's Knitting Lace, reprinted by Schoolhouse Press, was in the mailbox!

Oh, yeah. And I finally joined Twitter. Because I must follow CryForByzantium.

It's still raining, so we had gray watery light all day. I'm almost to the end of chart B. Tomorrow I will weigh my ball of yarn and take pictures even if it's still overcast out.

Have a good weekend!

I Blinked

Thursday, the kid and I went for a walk. On the way back, he was complaining that his toes were rubbing in the end of his shoes - shoes we just bought a couple of months ago.

Friday his dad was going to take him someplace, and I pulled out a pair of running shoes I bought for myself last fall and hardly wore.

They fit the kid perfectly.

Yesterday morning it was cold out. The floors were chilly. I pulled a pair of handknit woolly socks out of my drawer.

Hmmmm . . .

Yes.

I blinked.

And suddenly the child is ten, and he can wear my socks.

Locked in at the Zoo

Many of the blogs I read had some version of the Remembering 9-11 post.

Mine was quiet in a way because of 9-11.

Because of 9-11, my husband's day job has him in uniform most days of the week and some days of the weekend.

Because of 9-11, instead of being called a "weekend warrior, hur hur hur", complete strangers come up to him in the grocery store and shake his hand or pay for his breakfast when he eats in a restaurant.

Because of 9-11, we spent the evening of 9-11 locked in the zoo!

Operation Military Kids is a program meant to lighten the part of the load that kids bear when they have a mom or dad who is in the military.

Through OMK, my husband, our son, and I went to the zoo with a bunch of other military families, were locked in when the zoo closed, and spent the night in Binder Park Zoo's Wild Africa area.

We had dinner and did some icebreaking activities. We had (microwaved) s'mores (a marshmallow and a square of chocolate bar sandwiched in graham crackers) and a campfire. We slept in sleeping bags in a screened building and woke up to the crowing of red jungle fowl.

This morning, we had breakfast and watched ostriches up close.

We watched as the bontebok, zebra, and giraffes were released into their enclosure for the day. (Can you spot the giraffe? A triangular light spot halfway up the slope?)This is a 19-acre area with two natural ponds. I was amused to see that the giraffes have browsed it up around the edges of the fence just like a giant horse pen. It's a big enough area that the animals don't wear it out. I had to stitch two shots together to get the whole width in:

Here's a zoom shot as they were let out. You can see the two keepers who followed them out and shut the gates that lead back to the barn where they spend the night, and one of the two baby giraffes just born this summer.
In the "I love my camera" department, I cropped out all but the bit with the mother giraffe and her baby.Pretty good for about a quarter of a mile away.

Later in the day the giraffes came to the overlook where you can buy part of their daily food and let them take it through the netting. Baby Giraffe stood patiently . . .
While his mother ate some lettuce.

And tonight we are all completely wiped out and looking forward to sleeping in our beds and not on a concrete floor.

Busy, Back Soon. With Visual and Sound Effects.

This is a busy week:

We are finally getting the rest of our roof re-shingled (thumping, footsteps, and banging from overhead, dogs flinching and shivering);

We found a carpenter with the mental agility to frame in the windows and archway in our geodesic dome addition (skilsaw and pneumatic nailgun with airborne sawdust and drywall dust);

We have someone scheduled to hook up the gas to our mini soapstone stove (dust filtering down from the new chimney hole in the ceiling, shop-vacuuming and yarn smothering in protective plastic bags).

The computers are in the geodesic dome room. Before and after pictures when all is done and dusted!

I'm A-LIIIIIIIIVE!

Hi, I'm alive, didja miss me? Huh, didja, didja?

Saturday I spent the whole day at the Michigan Fiber Festival in humid 90-degree air, and after we got home, two internet installer guys in a van showed up to replace our broadband wireless receiver.

I thought, Great! Because the old one would work, then not work. Then work a little. Then work great for two days, then not work.

So they replaced the Jiffy pop receiver with a square-looking one, and came inside to test the speed. It looked great!

"Thanks a lot!" I said, and they got in their van and drove away, and I'm sure they had no sooner turned onto the street when our son said, "Mom, my game isn't downloading!"

Sure 'nough, it wasn't. Nothing was. Tried powering down the new receiver and powering it back up. Nothing nothing nothing nothing.

Sunday we were at the fiber festival again most of the day, but at the end of the day, still nothing!

We called them on Monday. Blah local tower down blah. And it just happened to coincidentally go down seconds after we got a new receiver? Hm.

Tuesday: tower up, no internet detected. Argh. Called and complained.

Today: called again. Sat and listened to terrible hold music for about half an hour. Sounds like they stretched an old Andreas Vollenweider tape, chopped it into pieces, and put it back together with masking tape.

Finally got different guy who had me unplug the antenna while he did . . . something. Then plug it back in to see if I'm connected. Whoa, magic, internet!

I'm back, hi hi hi!

Fiber festival report later while I recover from this bout of internet withdrawal.

Odds & Ends

I've been trying to organize this into a theme post, and it just isn't coming together. So here it is in bits and pieces.

Weather Stuff:

We have a set of two-way radios that receive the National Weather Service broadcasts. But the charger was unplugged when we moved the shelf they sit on, and hadn't been plugged back in. One radio would only flash its low battery signal, and the other would weakly pick up the local forecast if I walked around in the yard and found the right spot.

One of my brothers just gave me an emergency weather radio that receives only the NOAA weather bands.

Something that I found interesting was that although most of our tree damage happened Thursday night/Friday morning, the tornado that was reported occurred Friday night from 9:38 pm to 9:47 pm. That was while we were driving up into the flood zone, fortunately away from the tornado.

Another point about this tornado is that no tornado warning was issued for it, so it would not have triggered the alert function even if I had had the weather radio that night.

And it's got me really wondering about becoming a spotter, because it doesn't seem like any of the local earlier damage ever got reported.

Vacation Stuff:

Mackinac is pronounced "mack in awe" wherever you find it, except by tourists going by the spelling. Michigan place names are full of the "aw" sound (Saginaw, Leelanau, Keweenaw) and most of them don't have a confusing -ac ending.

Personal motor vehicles have been banned on Mackinac Island since July 6, 1898. The one exception is for police: we saw a Suburban driving very slowly down one street, and our son was both shocked and indignant, since we had told him no cars were allowed there.

Origins has a number of LARP (live action roleplaying) events and people who come in costumes. My favorites are probably the men in kilts.

And the most memorable to me was the young woman several years ago in a duct-tape bikini, stuck right to her skin. All I could think of when I saw her was I'll bet that's going to hurt when it comes off, but since then people have told me that she probably (well, I hope, anyway!) coated certain areas of her anatomy with petroleum jelly so the duct tape didn't rip them right off.

I usually take my camera and then suffer camnesia and totally forget it exists until we get home.

Knitting Stuff:

The Ravelry group I'm in is WIPs WrestleMania 2009. I'm wrestling as Madame Diamond Rose Python for Team Team. Go Team Team!

The only two WIPs I entered were Christel and the dragon skin bag, because I was tired of having them hanging over my head all this time.

Christel is (hooray!) done.

I started in on the dragon skin bag, knitted along, and promptly discovered that I'd made a mistake back on the first new row. But I tinked back and persisted and am still creeping along on it.

Lousy Internet Connection Stuff:

We've been suffering along with an intermittent and unpredictable wireless connection for about a month now. Sometimes we get no connection at all, sometimes it's all I can do to download email, and sometimes the thing opens up bandwidth-hoggy sites like Facebook in a finger snap.

Our provider used to be great and very responsive. On this issue they've been slow enough that my husband is starting to look for a different provider.

2008 in Review

Last year I did an end-of-year meme where you re-post the first sentence from your first blog post of each month of the past year. I liked that one enough to do it again. If you like it, you are hereby tagged!

January - Warming-Up Exercises: "Yep. Looks like the pterodactyl's got me."

February - Oops. Missed Silent Poetry Reading: "Which is weird, because I have a lunar phase poster from Celestial Products on my refrigerator, and I keep track of solstices and equinoxes and cross-quarter days."

March - With an Irrational and Giggly Love: "That's how I love weather forecasts like tonight's forecast for Monday".

April - Bra-a-a-a-ains: "I think there's a rule or a law or something that says Zombies have to say that."

May - Phoebe!: "I go in and out of my front door all the time."

June - Fixing Stuff, Knitting, Four O'clocks Again: "First we fixed the water heater: drain, rinse out a couple of inches of accumulated lime bits, replace both elements."

July - Bloody. Weird.: "We've had wet weather and a lot of deer flies have hatched out, so I just now took my walk in the late evening hoping to miss the worst of them."

August - I Picked Blackberries: "I'm covered with tiny stinging red scratches."

September - It's Here!: "Besides our regular soapstone woodstove from the Woodstock Soapstone Company, we now have this:"

October - No News / Not Sinking: "No news on the maybe-deployment front."

November - Linky Post: "Must.Share.Cuteness:"

December - Asparagus in the Snow: "Last week Bells posted a mouthwatering photo of grilled asparagus, and so I was thinking of getting a picture of an asparagus field in the snow."

Quiet Here

I've been in a bit of a winter funk. Christmas stuff seemed to spring on me all too early, and I don't seem to have the energy for it.

I managed to get out to a tree farm and with our son's help, get the tree decorated. I did get out shopping the other day, but I feel like my buying-stuff impulse is completely broken. Instead of enjoying picking things out, I felt overwhelmed by the wall of choices.

My husband gives a present every Christmas Eve to his extended family of his time and his cooking skills, buying the ingredients and making the seafood chowder his busia used to make for Christmas Eve. (This is not a cheap gift, not with bay scallops and oysters and lobster tails and shrimp all in one kettle.)

I find myself wishing I could do something like that. I've never felt I was that good at picking stuff out for other people. In the past I've been buying gift cards, but when two of last year's choices ended up in bankruptcy this year, even that seems like a risky choice.

I often feel I live in a country where the pursuit of happiness is assumed to be achievable by acquiring enough stuff. And I'm just tired of stuff.

Today I did not go out to even look at stuff. It was cold, with a high of 28 degrees F (-2 C). At 2 am. The temperature plummeted from there, and sat around 8 F (-13 C) most of the day, with occasional dips down to 6 F (-14 C). Between that and blowing snow, it seemed like a good idea to stay home, knit and make some bread.

When I was a kid, I never understood how winter could begin on December 21st. The astronomical event of the winter solstice doesn't correspond to the meteorological events of winter here. When you've had snow since November, what does it mean to say winter starts in December?

The solstice is the bottom of the gully as far as daylight goes. We're down to nine hours and something as of today. From here on out, it's all uphill into longer days.

This is all the same scarf with different yarns alternating and running out and new ones alternating. I've been knitting on it for so long, it's hard to believe the end is in sight. It's the same purple (it started out purple) waffle scarf that I started back in January of 2007. Only ten or so inches to go.

Art

What HelloQuizzy Claims My Taste in Art Says About Me...

Simple, Progressive, and Sensual

25 Ukiyo-e, 21 Islamic, 12 Impressionist, -22 Cubist, -24 Abstract and 12 Renaissance

Ukiyo-e (浮世絵, Ukiyo-e), "pictures of the floating world", is a genre of Japanese paintings produced between the 17th and the 20th centuries. It mostly featured landscapes, historic tales, theatre, and pleasure. Ukiyo is a rather impetuous urban culture that has bloomed in popularity. Although the Japanese were more strict and had many prohibitions it did not affect the rising merchant class and therefore became a floating art form that did not bind itself to the normal ideals of society.

People that chose Ukiyo-e art tend to be more simplistic yet elegant. They don't care much about new style but are comfortable in creating their own. They like the idea of living for the moment and enjoy giving and receiving pleasure. They may be more agreeable than other people and do not like to argue. They do not mind following traditions but are not afraid to move forward to experience other ideas in life. They tend to enjoy nature and the outdoors. They enjoy being popular and like being noticed. They have their own unique style of dress and of presenting themselves. They may also tend to be more business oriented or at the very least interested in money making adventures. They might make good entrepreneurs. They are progressive and adaptable.

Take What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test at HelloQuizzy

(No, you don't have to enter your email at the end - just skip that part and click the blue "show me my results" button.)

Coming up heavy on the Ukiyo-e style was not a surprise. I own a print of the cat picture in one of this test's galleries. (Hiroshige's Cat in Window.)

The Library of Congress has an online exhibit of Ukiyo-e here. The photo above is Hokusai's Peony and Canary from the Small Flowers series.

Does the Knitting Blogosphere Need Mint Oil?

What a question: does the knitting blogosphere need mint oil?

Why do I ask?

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, fairly soon after we were married, my husband and I went travelling. In the early years of our marriage, we did a lot of primitive camping, because campground fees back in those days were extremely cheap.

We had a Michigan county map book and a booklet that listed pretty much every campground everywhere. After a couple of days in a primitive campground, we'd move on to one with hot showers, no doubt one of the reasons that I still count indoor hot water as a blessing after all these years.

One hot summer night, quite late, we were heading west across the middle of Michigan, looking for a campground. It must have been late, because it was dark. In the darkness, we smelled mint.

"We're by St. Johns," my husband said.

Mint has been grown in St. Johns, Michigan, since the 1800's. When there are fields full of mint, the air blowing across it is full of the scent. It smells nothing like an air freshener.

This is the memory that came rushing back to me: putting up our little dome tent in the minty-smelling darkness and crawling into our sleeping bags, when I read that the Crosby Mint farm had been sold in a mortgage foreclosure sale for $300,000.

They are trying to redeem the farm by selling 77,000 dram bottles of pure mint oil by November 1. They are down to 61,000 (and counting) as of October 31st.

I just bought a couple of bottles. And I know when I smell them, I am going to feel like my 17 years younger self, setting up a tent in warm dark mint-scented summer air.

Anyone else need a couple of bottles of mint oil?

ETA: The website sometimes is unavailable, I hope due to hits pouring in! Here is an article in the Detroit Free Press about the farm and one on the WLNS TV 6 news website.

I don't know about import/export regulations or shipping to Australia (probably expensive!), but what they are selling is peppermint and spearmint essential oil. I can tell you from experience that the scent alone wakes me up. And I just read that mint oil on a cotton ball is supposed to repel mice! Hey, I know a spot where I need to put a minty cotton ball.

Wake-up Friday. With Errands. And General Rambling.

I worked last night and drove home thinking, "Cool! Tomorrow the child has no school; the husband has already worked his four ten-hour days; so I can sleep in!"

Hah.

At 4:16 am this morning, the black dog, Truffles, woke me up standing on her hind legs with her paws by my pillow. "Mmmmm," I probably said. Sometimes when she does this, if I just put my hand on her, she will sit down, then lay down (don't get on me about lie and lay: I keep looking it up and it keeps not sticking), then fall asleep.

Not this morning. She did curl up on her bed again for about one minute, but after getting the older-dog-with-bad-teeth breath right in the face a couple more times, I got up and let both dogs outside into the fenced yard.

Then I curled up on the couch with my son's hooded cloak over me and dozed off until Ajax scraped on the aluminum screen door to come in, and after that we all three went back to bed.

Until 7:15 am, when our son climbed onto the bed and started saying, "Wake up! Wake up!"

Raaahhhhhhh!

Oh, well, no sleeping in. Instead I had a fried egg chopped up on toast (yum, eggs from down the road with actual orange yolks and flavor) and a little later we bought a cabinet to stand the tiny soapstone gas stove on.

My Honda Fit is indeed a Tardis: the cabinet fit into the back, just like our old 1988 Honda Civic hatchback (also red, also a Tardis of a car).

After lunch, I went up to town to do grocery-shopping and look for shoes. My old white (formerly white) walking shoes have become "ventilated shoes," with the back ripped away from the sole, and so there was no putting off replacing them any more. Disreputable I can live with, but sticks stabbing me in the heel, no.

I hate shopping for shoes. Ever since I went to the Netherlands and saw how easily the Dutch can pick out Americans (that would be: Nikes + jeans + a university sweatshirt over a paunch), I've tried to avoid buying what I think of as dead giveaway American shoes. Some years it's easy, other years hard.

I did come home with a couple of pairs of walking-around shoes that I hope won't annoy me too much.

As a reward for finally doing the shoe-shopping, I bought some of the new Red Heart "Heart and Sole" sock yarn.

I have to say that it feels pretty nice. If I wound it off into a skein, overdyed it, relabelled it, and marked it up, I could probably smuggle it onto the shelf on the yarn store and no one would be curling their lip in that "Red Heart - euwwwww" way. I think they're a little late on the whole self-striping bandwagon, but hey, there's always dye.

Anyways, hi. I'm alive. Despite not getting to sleep in!

I Hate Change

Did I ever mention that? I hate change, and I've faced a lot of changes in July. Besides summer, that's another reason I haven't been blogging as much. I needed the energy to hold myself together.

My husband's AT was in July, so that was two weeks as parent-in-chief as well as chief cook and bottle washer. If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know that my husband cooks. I fix stuff. I can bake a chicken, but that's not so fun in summer heat. So we ate a lot of canned pasta.

Another change was that I got a part-time job.

It's a little difficult to find work that won't interfere with taking our son to school and picking him up. I tried mystery shopping for a while, but we live a rural area, and while there were a few local shops available, it wasn't steady work, and as a perfectionist introvert, I found it stressful.

Interact with strangers, get their names, note if they say hello when you get within a certain distance. Frankly, I'd rather be left the heck alone, and I've no doubt my body language transmits this. (When I was pregnant, not once did anyone uninvited touch my pregnant belly. If they had, I probably would have growled and then bitten them. See?)

So I am somewhat bemused to have found a great introvert job . . . cleaning a couple of local banks after hours. Dilbert's garbage man is my new role model. "You have a college degree and you're working as a janitor?" Heh. But really, it's great. I clock in and out by phone. I'm all by myself with nothing but a time limit.

Although this is a good change, having work again, it's still change, and I've been adjusting to it.

Yet another change is that we finally ordered a new washing machine. I found the parts online to fix the broken one: for $400+ ! At that rate, we have a friend who could get us a new front loader at an employee discount for only a hundred and something more.

It really grinds me to replace this one so soon after fixing it last year. Plus this will be another change when the new one is delivered Thursday.

Anyway, that's my summing up of July.

To start out the changes for August, I finally upgraded to Firefox 3.0.1. At least that one's not too stressful.

I took some pictures and later on I plan to post about taking the point off of an eyed needle in order to use it for knitting.

Meanwhile, I'm almost out of thread on the Valdani "Mountain Hike" bag.And Nancy Shaw and Margot Apple have a new sheep book out, Sheep Blast Off!