The Tortoise and the Hare

 

Remember the old fable of the tortoise and the hare? I do from my childhood, and I also remember a frenetic animated version of it.

As the story goes, when the race started the tortoise set off and plodded along steadily while the hare played around in the erroneous belief that it was fast enough to make up the difference and win no matter what. In the end the tortoise was ahead at the finish line, the hare couldn’t catch up, and the moral of the story is, as the saying goes, “slow and steady wins the race”.

I think now as I thought then as a child - it wasn't that the tortoise won the race. It was that the hare in its arrogance lost it.

Had the hare employed the same attitude of going forward step-by-step at its own best pace, it would have won that race, probably by a mile.

The truth is both could have completed the course in their own best times and been satisfied with their own consistent efforts - because the fallacy of the story is that life is a race at all.

But what if each had carried the other at different times, so they arrived at the same time? 

They might have gone even further along the road together.

Back to the Writing Desk...

... that is to say, the drawing board.

Unfortunately, as sometimes happens, we were not able to come to an agreement that everyone was happy with, so I'm back to looking for representation for Dervish Dust. However, I am not discouraged.

If anything I am excited, because the agent is still interested in seeing my fiction work when the first book is finished. That being the case, I'm going to now share some more about it.

Mermaid Summer

When Jenna Hanson moves to small town Windchime Lake, she hopes that she will finally be able to settle down for more than one school year, put down roots, and make some real friends. Her mom is excited to start a new business, and her dad hopes his new job as a biologist attached to the pulp-and-paper mill will be his redemption from a past big mistake in his career.

But almost immediately Jenna realizes there is something strange about the Lake that gives the village its name, and making new friends is not as simple as she hoped.

This is the first in a Middle Grade fantasy series.

I'm also embarking on a quest to improve my writing in general and increase my content output, so that I can submit short pieces both fiction and non, to the many markets available. My goal is to make a good living from my writing. It's that simple. So you will find some short bits and bobs on this site for a while - what might be called writing exercises.

Veteran's Day

James wrote:"Me and the boys at work on maneuvers."

Today is Armistice Day from World War I, and tomorrow is the Veteran's Day holiday here in USA, where we honor people who have served in the Military.

I won't go in to the politics today, but I will say that the fact that there are any veterans lacking access to services, jobs or even homes should be of concern to all of us. I volunteer with a group that helps people experiencing homelessness find work, and many of the our clients are veterans.

James Coburn was a veteran. He was drafted into the Army and spent a almost 2 years in the Service Battery in Germany after WWII. He mostly enjoyed his time in the service, as you may guess from the above picture, and took advantage of the GI Bill to study acting - and we know how well that turned out!

However, Jim was not the first of his family to serve. His uncle Darrell Coburn, the eldest of the four siblings that included Jim's father, had served in World War I.  He had been inducted into the army in September of 1918, part of the last big push to wrap the thing up (the Hundred Days Offensive). In the last months the Allies were putting 100,000 men into the field every day.

Darrell was 19 at the time. He was sent to the front lines, and was fortunate to return home when it was all over. But he lived the rest of his life as an invalid, and I suspect that he had been gassed. Darrell rejoined the family business, managing the Coburn Ford car dealership in the next town over - but he and his wife never did have any children.

Very best wishes to all veterans.

Lest We Forget.

Happy Birthday, James Coburn

This is James Coburn, pictured with my husband as a boy.

This photo would have been after Jim had become successful as a co-star in films like Charade (1963) and The Americanization of Emily (1964). It looks like it might have been from around the time of the shoot of A High Wind in Jamaica (1965), in which Jim sported a beard and mustache.

Here is a brief excerpt from the forthcoming biography:

The Coburn family had recently returned from what must have felt like a vacation, shooting A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) on location in Jamaica for two months, with a month in London for the interiors. Coburn had been to London for tests and rehearsals, then flew into Kingston on June 25 to be joined by Beverly and the kids about a week later. They then spent July and August of 1964 enjoying the tropical climate while he portrayed Zac, the cranky, wily second in command to Anthony Quinn’s Captain Chavez.

At the time, the shooting location, Rio Bueno, and the nearby beach villages had only recently been discovered by tourists. The area could certainly be described as an unspoiled tropical paradise—lush greenery, turquoise waters, pristine white beaches, and a nearly uninterrupted skyline in every direction. Most of the structures dated from Colonial times. It was perfect for shooting a Victorian-era period film.

The movie was based on a 1929 book, The Innocent Voyage by Richard Hughes, about a colonist’s wild young children who, on their way to school in England, accidentally stow away on a pirate ship. It is often compared as a kind of bookend to William Golding’s 1954 The Lord of the Flies. Both deal with themes of children as naturally savage beings who need the firm control and direction of adults to become or remain civilized. According to a 1986 documentary produced by Scottish Television about the director, Alexander Mackendrick was enthralled by the book, considering the “dark” novel a work of genius.¹²⁸ Some years earlier he declared that he “desperately wanted to make this movie.” After finishing the picture, he was less enthusiastic about the result, having learned a valuable lesson: “Second-rate books, you can make films of, but true masterpieces never should be transferred to the screen.” The story had been considerably lightened and sanitized in an attempt to skew it toward a family film.

Coburn was interviewed for the same documentary about his experience working with Mackendrick. “It was wonderful to watch him. He was producing the thing, helped build the sets, moving. He was doing more than anybody could ask because he wanted this thing to be really good. And he was very responsible to it. He’d dreamed about it, he told me, for twenty years.”

He went on to speak admiringly of Mackendrick’s ability with the child actors. The director had often worked with children and “learned more about working with adult actors from working with children.” He maintained an amazing level of patience. “He was superb with them. He never raised his voice to them. He would turn around, after this little girl who kept looking the same all the time, and [make a face then turn back smiling]. ‘Yes, darling. Just right.’ He would go after her and just… He knew how to do that. I don’t know how to do that. I would lose my patience with the children. But he wouldn’t lose his patience with anybody.”

Working with Mackendrick reinforced Coburn’s profound commitment to his art form. “I think he taught me the value of film, of the honor of making film, of dealing with the magical instrument, the realization of certain visions, the solidifying of dreams—that responsibility… Ah… I don’t think there’s anything anybody can do that’s more important than make films.”

A little hyperbole, perhaps. At the time of the documentary, 1986, Coburn seemed completely sincere in his beliefs about the cultural value of movies as a force for social change. It was an idea that had long percolated around in his thinking, and one that Beverly shared. She had written about it back in 1963—“Movies are the greatest propaganda we have, also the greatest setters of style and attitude, and I feel we should use the responsibility positively.”¹²⁹ Back then, as a couple they were discussing ideas that would shortly influence the next stage of his career. But in the meantime, A High Wind in Jamaica was an opportunity for him to really show his charisma on screen.

---

¹²⁸ “Mackendrick: The Man Who Walked Away 1/6,” YouTube video, 9:58, from a 1986 Scottish Television documentary, posted by robinofgray, June 3, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfeLZYVIGsY.

¹²⁹ Beverly Coburn to James Logan, January 17, 1963, private papers.

Still Unpacking.

See my pear tree outside the window?

  Well here we are in our new home. It's fantastic. All we keep saying to one another is how excited we are.

We have been sleeping here for a little over a week, and I still have tons of boxes to unpack and organize. We have brought all the things we wanted from our apartment, as well as emptied our storage unit.

Immediately we asked ourselves why on earth we spent money storing some of these old fashioned (but not old enough to be cool) things for so many years. We have sent much of the furniture to be sold in our upcoming estate sale. Sadly our wool rug was infested and utterly destroyed. Into the trash it went.

But the beautiful leather furniture (above) from James' dad is looking wonderful, especially as I re-condition each piece. Will it fit? Maybe. Maybe I will get the tree lit this week. Maybe I will finish painting my old bookshelves white.

I have mentioned in the past that I don't like drills or wasted motion. So I'm working slowly to put things, especially in the kitchen, where they should live. My greatest desire right now is for an organized, efficient, ergonomic kitchen. And a pantry. My pantry cupboard is still only half assembled. But it's going to be awesome.

Eventually.

Home schoolers compared to general population Infographic.

I don't really have any where else to store this infographic, but I like it a lot. Meanwhile please note that despite being the fastest growing educational choice, the number of kids home schooling is still relatively tiny - around 4% of the school aged population. Most telling stat: how little difference the level of parental education apparently makes in the test scores of home schooled kids.


Source: TopMastersInEducation.com

Jayn's Last Dance Recital with Penny

2005 

This time it really is the end of an era. Jayn's beloved dance teacher announced today at the 32nd Annual Recital that she is retiring. Today was the last recital at Dance With Penny, Jayn's tenth.

Jayn was 3 when she first started attending classes. It was touch and go for a minute as Jayn was NOT ready to separate. I spent the first year sitting on the floor of the studio below the mirror, so Jayn could run over and get a kissy as needed. By the end of the year I was sitting in the middle of the staircase.

Jayn's second year I sat downstairs, so that Jayn knew I was there and would run down and get a hug every now and then. After that I was able to stay in the car outside, and eventually I could run errands, or stay at the park around the corner with other moms and the kids would walk as a group with one supervisor, and come back after their hour was up. We often played at the park for a couple of hours afterwards.

2006

For 11 years this once a week class, and some of the connected activities, like the park day we created for the families who all came on Tuesdays, has been the anchor of our week, and much of our life. For several years, I continued to make Tuesday outings for some of our group over summer, just so that we could keep up the rhythm.

2008

In some ways it is now freeing. We couldn't move too far away from dance class. We couldn't plan road trips if we would miss classes at the wrong time (close to the recital especially). The only thing Jayn and I tended to have conflict over was working around her sleep schedule, especially when Penny urged her to get to more classes.

That was one crazy can can.

Jayn finds change tough. She doesn't know what she will do to keep fit. She fears that she will see less of her friends now that they won't meet every Monday, so I need to make that a priority. She feels like (rightly so) a huge part of her life will be missing. But there will be new opportunities, new interests, new passions - and plenty of wonderful memories.

June 15, 2013 Jayn and Penny

Creeping terror, and the damnable, frustrating waste of it all.

My mother-in-law passed away just before Christmas. She died at peace with her family including me. What she left behind however, her estate, is not peaceful but rather an enormous cacophony of stuff.

I have taken on the task of managing the move, storage and organization of her many collections, in preparation for sale. It's a job that I can best do, as a service to my family, since I have no emotional attachment to her things, no fond childhood memories to revisit to slow down the job of wrapping and packing. There is a mountain of things from fine art, to decorative pieces and antiques, to ordinary household goods like the cookware from three different kitchens, to an endless supply of dark colored sweat pants and knit tops in a range of sizes.

Beverly collected. In her youth she collected Asian art and textiles from her travels, esoteric books and the fine art pieces of her artist friends. In her later years she collected catalogs, gems from cable shopping networks and boxed art notecards.

And a lot of her things are undeniably trash that she just wasn't able to release. I have placed hundreds of outdated catalogs from clothing and home decor stores into the recycling bin. Every small box, dish or basket has to be checked because lurking among paper detritus, used matches, cat treats and bottles of expired aspirin, will be a ruby ring or silver art deco hair pin. So many of her belongings are frustratingly damaged, including some of the decorative art pieces that otherwise would be of great value. So every tiny piece of wood or tin has to be examined and saved in case it is needed to repair something.

I have found boxes of garments, many new with the tags still on them, others stained and marred by scorch marks. The sizes range from Medium to 3XL. She kept vintage designer pieces and kimonos, which is great - but not everything was put away cleaned, which is not. She also kept ordinary contemporary clothes that no longer fit, rather than ever donate anything. Plus I have 10 old tube television sets, which may or may not work, but have to go to e-waste recyclers.

Much of what she saved over the years became part of what she considered her arts and crafts stash - beads, paper, interesting ephemera, shells (boxes and boxes of shells). But the sad thing is that in recent years, there is little evidence that she actually created, or at least completed, anything.

In her drawers and closets I found a few small half-formed beginnings of things - several items gathered in a dish, a beetle in a plastic box, a piece of gold wire almost wrapped around an antique bead pilfered from a beaded curtain. She kept supplies until they were beyond use, like paint tubes that had hardened, inks dried to a shadow, paper yellowed and crumbling. Then she bought more to suffer the same fate. It was as if she had many intentions but evidently little follow through in action.

It has been challenging to witness these dismaying twins of waste and lost opportunity. As a maker I too have a tendency to collect ephemera and materials. I keep things I like with the plans, oh yes the plans, to make art with them. But many of them sit for years. I have started to feel a kind of creeping panic, terror even, that I am becoming a hoarder without productivity.

I get some relief from my recent determination to organize my workspace. At least I know where everything is, in labeled boxes, which gives me a great advantage over my poor mother-in-law whose every drawer was a mish mash, and whose inability to find things among the stacks meant numerous repeat purchases. I surely don't want to die leaving a great challenging mess for my daughter to have to sort. I now believe that my recent purge was insufficient. Labeling and organizing (in her case piling and stacking) can also be tools of procrastination.

The other thing that disturbs me is the small scale of her work - and mine. I am a doll maker, so by definition sometimes my work is miniature - but that's not what I mean. I am speaking of the aesthetic value of the work. What disturbs me now is that I see, as a mirror, my tendency to dash out something small, and unimportant, because it is quicker to do, easier to set up. Small like a card or a flower pin, instead of moving forward on my larger scale - personally valuable and important - projects. It's fiddling around instead of diving in to the flow. Remember Covey's Time Management Matrix? 

I realized today that this scale issue has kept me focused on "crafting", instead of attacking my new business with gusto, or engaging with my next artistic goal of making large scale sculptures, or devoting real attention to my screenwriting. It's not only my personal satisfaction I am seeking, but also the idea of leaving a legacy of completed work.

Ironically writing for Natural Life Magazine hasn't helped. A while ago I wrote about my process of designing projects for the magazine (scroll down). Since my focus there is making crafts from recycled and upcycled materials, I have a tendency to hold on to stuff with the idea that it might become useful for the column, instead of simply looking in the recycling bin when I need something.

My mother-in-law lives in the memories of her family and friends, but passed away leaving only stuff as her public legacy. Some more special stuff, the family will claim as useful or meaningful; some stuff people will be glad to put to use; other stuff, being long unused, should have made its way back into circulation a long time ago.

I have a new determination - as soon as this ongoing estate disposal business concludes - to simplify my workspace, reduce the clutter of ideas by streamlining my plans, and ruthlessly eliminate those items I am holding on to non-specifically - just because they might be something one day. Gotta get rid of more of my old stuff.

Stay tuned for a de-stash - very soon.

Oh, and if you know anyone who wants a set of random antlers, let me know. We seem to have at least 20.

Road Trip to San Francisco.

Foggy morning over the Golden Gate

We took a quick road trip north, since it has been so long. We drove mostly the coast road to Carmel/Monterey and stayed in that region for two nights. Then we scooted up to San Francisco for a night of luxury and some adventures in the fog, before heading south again somewhat inland, stopping in King City for the last night, and then driving all the way home. This has been the first non-conference trip that we have taken since Jayn was a very little girl, and it's been a different experience.

One of the things Jayn specifically wanted to do was visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a place of fond memories. Last time we were there Jayn was about 4 or 5. She had a wonderful time playing in the spectacular kids section, and getting a bit wet. She didn't mind putting her fingers in the water to explore in the touching pools.

This time she was, of course, way too big for the little kids' interactive play area, and she has developed quite an aversion to creepy-crawlies or getting wet in her regular clothes. The museum was very crowded - oops Spring Break - and it was nearly impossible to get close to any of presentations. However we took some photos of jellies, and sea horses. The most interesting part was the new aviary, where shoreline birds ignore the gawking crowds even in the absence of any kind of wall. They are all rescued or fostered birds, and it was neat to see them close up, and hear their different calls.

Without the super fun of the Splashzone, and with the crowds, the aquarium did not hold our attention to the same degree at all, and we left fairly quickly.

Mission at Carmel. Note the out-of-whack star over the door - hand cut stone.

We drove the 17 Mile Drive in Pebble Beach, and again enjoyed the scenery and took plenty of photos. Plus we visited the  San Carlos Borromeo Mission at Carmel, which is a working parish church, beautifully restored, and currently undergoing earthquake retrofitting. There are two museum areas, but it is the interior of the church itself and the gorgeous statuary and Nativity diorama I most enjoyed. To me, by definition, if a figurative sculpture is dressed in textiles garments, then that makes it an Art Doll. The church was also full of Easter lilies.

Dressed Mary, about 24 inches tall.

The next day James and I drove out to Salinas to visit the John Steinbeck Center, which I really liked. Steinbeck's life story is told with images, words, audio snippets and artifacts in great detail. The exhibit is interactive and very cleanly attractive, with the Hollywood connection to his works integrated really well. I love text used visually, and text is the foundation of this whole shebang, with quotes screen printed in odd places within the full size dioramas. In addition there was an exhibit of local art, at this time landscapes in oil, and a photography exhibit - art photos of items and architectural detail from the California Missions. It's a very interesting space. However, I'm sure Jayn would have tired of it way too soon, so I'm glad she wanted to nap at the hotel instead.

Steinbeck book cover display at the Center Gift shop

In San Francisco we stayed at the historic Nob Hill hotel, the Mark Hopkins. Here again was a sweet little multimedia history exhibit featuring a time line, souvenir art and various rescued historical items like a key from 1939 and old menus along with a couple of short films about different people who were part of the hotel's story. One was an interview with a 100 year old lady who had been the artist's model for a permanent and famous mural in one of the hotel's ballrooms from the 1920's.

Main entrance at night of Mark Hopkins. Note the beautiful plasterwork decorating the arches.

Both of these exhibitions are fascinating to me as a scrapbooker - combining images, ephemera and journaling to record history but also to create a harmonious whole.

San Francisco was foggy and chilly overnight. We had watched the bizarre inversion layer off shore as we drove North, with a sharply delineated top line that looked like a second horizon. But the fog in San Francisco was deep and thick, swallowing the tops of tall buildings and the points on the bridges and making everything at ground level moist. We started walking in the late afternoon, took our first cable car ride, and went in search of a store that makes nothing but an assortment of bread puddings. The City Hall in SF is gorgeous, and so is the Symphony Hall.

Waiting for the bus in a light drizzle, outside of the Symphony Hall.

San Francisco is like Sydney in more ways than just having a spectacular harbor with a well known bridge. Both cities have many beautiful, historic buildings downtown, with carvings and detail in sandstone, juxtaposed with very modern architecture. It's important to look up as you walk or ride the trolley. Both have row houses and dense urban populations. Loved the three storey house made from stacked shipping containers, and the five storey former office building converted to artists' lofts with 10 foot tall (my estimate) slanted windows on the top floor. The city is magnificently clean, and all the public trash bins have an attached basket on top for glass and can recycling.

We all noticed the high level of fashion and style demonstrated by the population. Somehow leggings, boots and a trench just look orders of magnitude more chic on girls hiking up the hills in SF than the girls manage in my local mall. Everyone's clothing seemed to fit very well. I guess walking up and down those hills every day doesn't hurt anyone's fitness level either.

Foggy vista outside the hotel.

After a luxurious night with room service and a misty view, we drove down the twistiest street (Lombard St), then across the Golden Gate Bridge and back, then went to Yerba Buena Gardens to check it out. We didn't have a lot of time to spend now for museums or galleries (next time!) but I was very moved by the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial there. I have promised myself that next trip I am going to take one of those sight seeing buses - the kind you can get on and off - and see the whole city.

Martin Luther King Jr memorial at Yerba Buena. Behind the waterfall fountain is a path with the "Dream" speech engraved on the walls and images, in many languages. The glass walls reflect the waterfall and the noise adds to the whole experience. (Below)

In King City (more interesting history) we found an elegant superfluity of 4 star rated Mexican restaurants - all lined up one after the other along the main drag, Broadway. We ended up eating what was my favorite meal of the trip at El Sinaloense. Odd twist of fate - everywhere (EVERYWHERE!) we went to eat we beat the rush by about five minutes. By this I mean we would enter an empty or nearly so joint to be seated, only to watch the place fill up and lengthy line form shortly thereafter. This even happened at a roadside fruit stand where we got fabulous fresh strawberry shortcake direct from the growers. Don't know why, don't wanna know, just hope the magic continues.

We passed the Old Mission San Miguel steeple and old wall. There is also the working church and 

restored mission, but Sunday services were in progress so we didn't stop.

On the road again, and I learned what Jayn likes best about road trips now is the actual driving, especially through scenic forests. It was fascinating to watch the scenery change from lush green, cypress and oak woods slowly back to desert through the Salinas Valley. When she was tiny it was so easy to travel with her. Generally she slept a good deal, but when we stopped, even at roadside rest stops, she would find endless fascination in watching birds or lizards, or finding a ramp to run up and down. True she had little interest in art galleries, but she was satisfied with any playground, and if there were water....Now she is easy to travel with in a different way. She has her technology, and she is contented to look out of windows and take a few photos. Still little interest in art galleries or museums - but she likes people watching, buildings, vistas and trees.

Keep watch for some scrapbook layouts with more of my family photos from our trip.

Two Cats Need a Home

As some of you may know by now, James' mother passed away last Wednesday. She had two grown indoor cats who now need a loving home in the Los Angeles general area (for the sake of transporting them). 

One is an older boy cat, probably over 10, white and fluffy, Sharkie, who loves to scratch on cardboard, and is a little standoffish with strangers. The other, Myrrh, is a younger girl cat around 3 years old, black with touches of white, who is very shy and likes high places. Both cats are healthy, but a little skittish, probably in part because they know something has happened to mommy. They have lived in the same place for a very long time.



I don't think they are friendly enough to be in a home with small children, and they also have no experience with dogs. 

No one in the family has the ability to keep the cats. We are all putting the word out to find some one to take them. There will most likely be small stockpile of cat food and sundries coming with them, and ideally we hope they will stay together.

If anyone can help, please let me know. Here are some photos - once I took the pic of Myrrh, she decided to go hide, so this one peeking over is all I have.

Concerning planned obsolescence and coffee making

My Keurig has been buggy for quite a while. It did work perfectly for at least 18 months, but then started getting increasingly temperamental. At first this manifested as constant requests to "De-Scale Now", regardless of how recently and thoroughly I had done so - following the manufacturer's recommendations, and even buying special stuff. Then however the internal computer that measures cup size went whacky. The machine would either pour about half a cup of coffee into the mug, regardless of the size chosen, or continue a stream of increasingly diluted coffee to fill two mugs and then some - or as tended to happen until I got wise, fill the drip tray and overflow to the counter.

My usual set up with jug.

It has now gotten to the point where I leave a jug under the spout, because it may decide to release some hot water at unpredictable intervals. I have quite a method for getting my coffee. I select either size (doesn't matter any more). The machine draws in some water and stops. If I wait a few gurgly drops may fall, and water pools on top of the pod - so grinds drip out if I lift the handle. So what I generally do is press the power button, wait a few seconds, switch it back on and wait for the Select Size cups to flash again momentarily. Then I press the size again (often only the larger size is available) and the machine draws in more water and starts to brew and pour.

As soon as my cup is full, I exchange it for a jug or other cup, and let it continue to pour, for what seems to be a random time. My sister-in-law experienced a similar problem after some time with her Keurig.

My experience with electronic gadgets and appliances in the past has been that taking them apart and giving them a bit of a clean, making sure all the connections are tight and uncorroded, often does wonders for making them come back to life. I'm fed up with the darn Keurig, so I decided to have a look inside and see if there was any scale build up that I could clean out manually.

After unplugging, of course, I turned the thing upside down and started unscrewing, pleased to see standard sized phillips head screws. This boded well. I took the bottom plate off, and was able to go one more "layer" of screws into the machine, before I came to a realization.

Keurigs are designed to be replaced, not repaired. Evident planned obsolescence. I have read that the company does not repair the machines.

It's not that repairing it would be impossible, just really time consuming and fussy for the technician, and therefore expensive for the consumer - most likely more expensive than a new unit. Nothing is plugged in, everything is soldered. It's not at all modular inside. Some of the screws are nearly impossible to get to without disconnecting every other part - and the wires pretty much have to be cut just to get parts out of the housing. Some screws are so inaccessible I didn't even know they were there until a piece of plastic cracked off in one corner. The water hose is enclosed inside parts or insulation in more than one place, to make it almost impossible to replace in the event of damage. To be fair, the likelihood of damage to the hose inside the machine is vanishingly small.

I can see the sense in making an internally complex machine, to deter industrial competition. The innards are a cautious meeting of water and electronic components, and of course the computerized part and LCD. It is certainly very solid - lots of steel plates. I'm sure there are many safety aspects of how it is put together. But to go further in my exploration I would need special screw drivers, and considerably more motivation. It's not deconstruction. It's demolition. And that is why the reconstruction would be a pain.

Upcycled K-Cup light shades on my holiday garland.

I may bite the bullet and break it down to components, once I have determined on a new course for my morning coffee. I have a bulk box of pods to finish. At the end of that, I may return to the old drip filter way - and my small 4-cup drip machine languishing in the back of the newly organized cupboards behind the stand mixer has a permanent, reusable mesh filter so I don't even need to buy paper coffee filters. They - machine and filter - have lasted for years and years. I also own a very nice single serve french press travel mug. That's the simplest thing of all.

It's been fun, having a single serve instant use coffee maker - or at least it was until fiddling became more prevalent than convenience. Part of the attraction of Keurigs and similar machines, is the idea of a wide variety of flavors and drinks. I do have some nice tea, hot chocolate and apple cider pods. But for actual coffee, I have a strong preference for Fair Trade, so that has limited my flavor choices essentially to one, which negates the main advantage of Keurig.

The more I write, the more I'm talking myself out of getting a new Keurig. I haven't made a cup since I put it back together. Let's hope everything sealed back up properly at the water intake point. I don't like fuss. I don't like having to fuss. I just want things to work. Simple things work simply, don't they?

Any thoughts on coffee makers? Please comment!

The clean up continues.

Crafting and sewing storage

I don't know if anyone has noticed, but I've been pretty darn quiet on all my blogs over the last couple of weeks. I've done no writing, no crafting, no scrapbooking, no doll making, no art. Basically I've been so focused on the declutter that other things have been put on hold. However, Jayn's small birthday party went well, and the girls learnt how to play charades. I heard a lot of laughing from the other room.

Latest Donations - lots going to the nursery school my neighbors kids attend - rest to Goodwill.

My big clean has been wonderful. We took another load to the Goodwill yesterday, and yet another load to storage. James said that it looked like our storage unit was getting full, but I replied, "You can still see the ceiling".

The empty, tidy hallway.

It's funny how small things can give so much pleasure. I put my vacuum cleaner away inside the hallway closet, and it felt wonderful. So now it is just the bedroom, the bathroom, and one small corner of the office. I'm not doing that today though. I have a Halloween costume to finish.

Meanwhile I'm at home hoping the phone does not ring. Because my new doctor has a "no news is good news after a week" policy. There are ultrasounds and mammograms and other lab tests to wait for - mostly just routine stuff. Get your mammograms ladies. It doesn't hurt anywhere near as much as purported by humor. The worst part is that it might pinch your skin just a bit. It's not even pain, but just a little bit of momentary discomfort, and pressure that is probably less than from your too small underwire bra at the end of a long day. And a mammogram is not a long day. Just a half a minute per image.

A Tale of Two Tiles

Ancient tile work in a fountain - The Getty Villa, Malibu 

Modern tile work in progress in our shower - Coburn Casa, Playa del Rey

Actually they have just about finished the shower. Right now they are putting the silicone sealer around the door. Another contractor has to come and repair the wood door jamb and seal and paint the concrete on the outside of the shower recess. The project will have taken three weeks on Wednesday.

I love the Getty Villa. We visited on Friday. They have the Pompeii exhibit going at the moment, which is about the works of art and photography inspired by the event, and the re-discovery and excavation of the site. The curators have been thoughtful and clever. My favorite moment is the contrast between this romantic painter's idyllic vision of buxom young women with petal pink skin hauling baskets of rocks away from the dig site, and an actual photo of the dry and dusty (fully clothed) swarthy male workers doing the actual work, along with their super carrying a hefty stick to keep them going.

Working on our shower

 Some time ago our downstairs neighbor noticed moisture and mildew coming from above his shower, that is to say our shower recess. At the time a cracked tile in our shower recess was blamed, eventually replaced, and a very bad job done of re-grouting our shower.

Over time it has proved nearly impossible to keep mold and mildew from swiftly growing into the grout and silicon seal in our shower, exacerbated by the lack of sunlight into the shower recess itself (although the bathroom is lovely and light, especially in the afternoons from the west facing window). Seven months ago I noticed that grout had completely cracked away in some places, and alerted the management to the extreme probability that the same problem would recur.

About one month ago, someone finally came to inspect the issue, and decided that I needed new tile work and a new shower pan, so the workers have come today at last. As it turns out several other apartments in the complex also have leaks below their showers.

However once the tiles have been lifted and the cement broken up with a jack hammer, they found that all the wood has rotted and also needs replacing. I am  not surprised - the water had to go somewhere, and this has been years and years. I suppose we can count ourselves lucky that we haven't fallen through the floor! James tells me that this actually happened in a house he lived in as a young person.

The smell of mold is very strong. I'm glad the guys have masks in there.

Meanwhile I have been given some extra impetus to focus on my household clean up by the landlord. Forward. As of today, another cupboard emptied, more defunct gadgets boxed for the recycler, and the kitchen is still immaculate. (I even put the mixer away immediately after using it last night.)

Tidying the Craft Supplies

My declutter is moving very slowly, what with travels and doll commissions and rewrites of scripts. However I am at a point where I have an urgent need to reorganize my art and craft supplies, take stock of what I have and create the space for the next round of Craft-It-Easy project designs.

I've grabbed two large cardboard boxes. and just cleared the two tables of all the projects in progress and other stuff that had accumulated directly into the boxes - instant space. Then I started allocating all the supplies to small clear boxes I had purchased for the purpose. They all have lids, so they'll stack and fill the space on the shelves more efficiently than my current overflowing open topped system. I've got the labels temporarily taped to the fronts, so that if I find I need to redistribute I can. I'm surprised to learn how many rubber stamps I have, and how few decorative punches. The other great plus - I found my brayer! I've been searching for it.

In other news, Jayn is going to Wide Sky Days without James or I. She will be staying with our friend Erika, and I expect that she will have a wonderful time. She is all packed and ready. I will be driving her down in the morning, after a trip to the market to stock up on easily prepared snacks. It is true that all things have their season - and this is a season of separation and maturity. It is further proof that there is no need to force or push independence on our children. The growth to autonomy comes at the right time, and sometimes with a great big leap.

Not Exceptions

Tin Man near my house.

This idea has been percolating around in my mind for a long time. Now I'm going to write it.

Most people think of themselves as good and kind, or at least in the right. Most people are in their daily lives. Most people staunchly deny that they are prejudiced or bigoted. They would never think of using a racial or other slur in their daily conversation, or even in their thinking, and would feel shocked and uncomfortable if someone else did so, especially within earshot of the insulted. They point to the undeniable fact that they have gay co-workers, or other race neighbors, with whom they are friendly.

Someone once said that racism in the US was like the rain. You go outside you will get wet. I think the clouds are clearing some, but we still need our umbrellas. Homophobia is still institutionalized in most State constitutions.

However there is a kind of casual, everyday, common or garden, bigotry that is almost invisible. People hold on to assumptions, revealed in words like "they", or "those people", or "people like that" when  referring to a particular minority. Phrases like "The Gay Lifestyle" or "from a bad neighborhood" or "they have their own culture" homogenize people into groups. (The irony that I am doing something similar here, is not lost on me - but we only have so many pronouns, and I fear that I am not talking about a minority.)

Then the assumers (nice, well-meaning, kindly people) meet and get to know on a personal level, some individual that does not fit their stereotype. Instead of being unmotivated that youth is busy and hardworking; instead of being promiscuous, that man settled in a serious relationship; instead of being violent and scary, these teenagers are kind and responsible; instead of being ignorant and stupid, that woman is well informed and articulate; instead of wearing wild clothing, that person classy and elegant.

Here's where the shadowy bigotry lies. These folks then believe that their new friend, the individual from the "other" group, is an Exception.

And the great sad irony is, instead of re-examining their assumptions in the light of new, contrary evidence, they apparently persist in holding on to them. It seems no matter how many of these Exceptions that they meet, they still regard their own friends and colleagues as just that - Exceptions.

It's cognitive dissonance.

This is where the challenge lies. Not in the clarion calls of the visible, publicly declaiming their bigotry. These are the easy ones to fight. But seeing inside good people's hearts, illuminating their persistent beliefs that hold despite new, personal, knowledge, how do we fight those? How do we help people consider that maybe they have been wrong all along, that maybe the exceptions are not?

My Favorite Cheap Eats

James took this photo on our summer trip that year, and I scrapped it.

I love to eat but I don't like to cook. However not cooking becomes a very costly option, even when it is just Jayn and I. So it's nice to know there are a couple of inexpensive yet consistent options outside of the fast food chains.

The first favorite is: Ikea. In the Bistro, the Swedish meatballs, gravy, potatoes and lingonberry sauce is a big, share-able plate and so delicious, while the beef hot dogs are some of the best value ever. Meanwhile upstairs is a second restaurant offering even more gourmet-ish options, including a Chicken Caesar for $4.99, and a couple of vegetarian choices. The good sized scrambled eggs, bacon and spuds breakfast plate is 99cents. Plus the coffee is hot and strong, and there is always that Lingonberry soda drink for something different.

When Jayn was little she loved playing in the rooms all set up in the kid's area. She would decide one was her "office" and there would be all kinds of pretend play. She also loved trying out all their fun furniture. That spinning chair that looks like an egg was her favorite. No one minds how long the kids play, as long as they aren't racing about or climbing over the safety rails.

My next favorite is: Costco. Although you must be a member to access the inside with all the samples (which can make up an eclectic meal if you hit it at the right time - especially the weekend early to mid afternoon), anyone can go to the cash only snack bar outside. The menu is limited but tasty, especially the famous Chicken Bake that can easily feed two. (I usually end up saving half for later). Recently they added some salad items to the several different pizzas by the (enormous) slice. They too have a couple of large hot dog selections. I like the Mocha Latte Frozen Smoothie, which beats the coffee shop version by a country mile. 

As I recall, the new Brass Key porcelain dolls used to come out in Costco each August. They start their holiday toy inventory pretty early, but it's worth buying and putting away. We bought an Aurora porcelain doll for under $20 when Jayn was two and a half. So beautifully painted and dressed. She hauled it everywhere and played constantly, and it made our long road trip that summer so much easier. She was very careful with it too. I think I was the one who eventually chipped its hand or foot by dropping it. 

Where do you find good cheap eats in your neighborhood?

Notes From the Edge of the Abyss, or don't make the same mistakes I did - vintage post updated

I wrote this in 2010 - a lot has changed in my life since then, but not the essentials of these ideas. It's good to have a reminder sometimes.

It’s true that there is deep and horrific poverty in the world. I count my blessings every time I turn on my kitchen faucet and remember that I don’t have to haul water in 10 gallon loads on foot across five miles of gravelly scrub land. It’s also true that there are many people much worse off than me even in my local community. I still have a roof over my head, electricity, gas heating, even internet access and satellite television. 

My husband has two jobs, and I have two part time jobs, none with benefits or long term security, but we are managing. Just. The truth is that I have avoided looking sternly at my own lousy money management. I’ve refused to admit that I am a stupid spendthrift, short sighted, and did I say stupid with money? So here are some lessons, finally and painfully learnt by me after a lifetime. 

  1. Save money while you are young. I was so fortunate when I was starting out in theater in my early twenties, to have a great job at Her Majesty’s Theater in Sydney. I don’t think the old place exists any more, but at the time there was a wonderful sense of continuity for me to be working in the very company in which my mother got her start in musical theatre. I had an inexpensive rented home. Prior to that I had been lucky enough to live rent free for a few years in the small house my mother had bought as an investment property before leaving the country to marry. 

 Trouble is, I was a party girl. Without many responsibilities other than work, recently divorced, and feeling free and unfettered for the first time in my life, I was determined to enjoy the night club scene with the other beautiful people from the theater world. Late work hours, foolishness and a steady income made a bad combination. If I had been thinking of the future for a single second I wouldn’t have spent so much of my paycheck on nonsense. I could have ventured out once a month and used the rest of my money to create a nest egg that could have earned interest very happily over thirty years. 

  2. Learn to cook. Learn to love to cook. I know this sounds like a silly thing, but I have spent most of my adult life avoiding the kitchen. Aside from being the only living person who actually likes my own experimental cooking, I’ve struggled with finding the enjoyment even in the basics. I wish now that I had stayed in home economics in high school, a subject I spurned as lowly status, not being academic enough. Plus I thought I would be able to learn cooking at home. But I never did make any attempt to cook at home. Nor was I invited to be part of domestic tasks, because I was always told that my job was to study. As a result way too much of my money has gone into supporting the restaurant industry. I used to tell myself that I was too busy, but the fact is I just don’t like it. I don’t mind baking, funnily enough, but you can’t live on cupcakes and gingerbread.

 

It’s the chopping, the peeling, the fine prep work, that irks me. It’s the recollection of my grandmother whose entrapment in a miserable marriage for 60 years seemed symbolized by her endless pose at the kitchen sink, staring out the window hand washing her china, and boiling vegetables until the life was sucked out of them. How I love working in the movie business – they feed you every day on a feature film set. Usually at least a continental breakfast, snacks available all day, a catered hot lunch exactly six hours after call time, and if the shoot runs overtime, a second hot meal. Heaven. The perfect job, provided you don’t have a family waiting at home for you to cook for them. 

 There are great convenience foods around the supermarket these days that were rare when I was young. Skillet meals, steam in the package meals, instant rice. They are somewhat more expensive per serving than starting from scratch. Not as expensive as ordering in Thai food. Not nearly as expensive as going out to eat. 

I used to eat at one particular Vegetarian Thai restaurant around the corner from my theater every night. I was the Technical Director then. I would stay at work until opening, then go and eat my favorite dishes, reading a book while there. After a leisurely meal I would return to the theater for curtain, and to get a report. If there were to be any kind of disaster, they knew where I was, and there never was a disaster in my absence. 

 The irony of it is that my home was just a block further on. I could easily have gone home to eat, and still have been accessible. I could probably have been putting $400 a month into the bank – and this was twenty years ago. So learn to cook and find a way to enjoy it so that you can limit your eating out to special occasions and save your money. It’s amazing how quickly the costs of a ordering in even once a week mount up. 

  3. Find a rich broker to handle your investments. My husband and I had a bit of money early in our marriage and we invested a good part of it with a brokerage firm. It wasn’t much money in the grand scheme of things, not even enough for a down payment on a house in our high priced city, so I guess we were allocated to one of the junior brokers. We calculated that guy cost us about $100 grand over the course of about three years. 

 Several times we had the same sequence of events. My husband, an avid technophile and online researcher, would find some new and cool hi tech manufacturer going public. These would usually be small companies starting out. He would call the broker and suggest buying up some stock. The broker would always talk him out of it, convincing him it was too risky and that our money was safer in the established high tech stocks where it was at the time. Every time we would watch as our “safe” stock slowly dropped and the new, exciting techno marvel that my husband had found would skyrocket in price, independent of whatever the DOW was doing. 

What we failed to ask ourselves quickly enough was if our broker was so good at picking stocks, why was he the low man on the totem pole working for an hourly wage and the meager commissions from our tiny sums? My husband was doing a better job of picking stocks than the so-called professional. Finally we needed the cash so we had to sell out at a small loss, so at least our tax consequences were minimal. But it still rankles when we think of “that guy”. 

  4. Pay your bills the old fashioned way - and use cash for daily expenses. For a long time we were paying our bills via paperless methods. The convenience and simplicity of joining the ubiquitous auto deduct programs would appear to mean that our bills would never be late. 

Unfortunately these are a lot easier to join than they seem to be to withdraw from, and once a company has your banking information online, they seem to be perfectly willing to continue to submit auto deducts at their convenience rather than ours. With several business accounts at the same bank all cross linked, instead of simplicity it added confusion and some e-bills were missed in the obfuscating stream of emails and spam from the various institutions.

 

Above: Box decorations made from bill envelopes. 

It seems like a wonderful service to have “overdraft protection” too but beware. You may find yourself paying $34.00 for an iced tea. The banks will hold a series of withdrawals, POS debits and auto deductions until they have a collection, especially over a weekend. Then by policy they will withdraw the largest amount first, hoping to push the account into overdraft status and charge a hefty flat fee, unconnected to the amount of each deduction, for each charge. They will hold deposits and count them after they have accounted for the withdrawals also. You have to actively opt out of this “service” so that the bank will just do what banks used to do in the olden days and refuse to pay if the funds are insufficient. 

The main point is that it became increasingly difficult for us to really see our spending when it was all in the virtual world. It was entirely too tempting to just assume the bills were correct and skim over them or not even double check when the priority was speed and convenience. I became un-mindful of our expenses, from whence it was a short and comfortable slide into denial. After close to $1000 in these fines we closed our bank account and opened another so that our regular service providers and utilities do not have in their online records - a clean slate so we can wrest control of our outgoing money back to ourselves, and as inconvenient and boring as it may be, I have returned to paying bills individually. (I still use online payments, but not auto-deductions.)

   5. Turn Ideas and Dreams into realistic action. For a while there I kept coming up with creative non-fiction book ideas – as the broad genre is called. Every time I had what sounded like a good idea, I’d jot it down and go to the online bookstore to start my research. Sure enough, there would be “my” book recently published. 

I chose to be encouraged, decided that this was a good thing – clearly my ideas had commercial potential and perhaps my finger was on the pulse of something or other. I just had to come up with an original idea first, something that reflected my personal interests and thoughts, my own aesthetic. Examining my interests and such expertise as I can claim have been the paths to originality. I’ve developed some ideas that should in due course fulfill their potential to be income producing. 

I don’t expect to become a multimillionaire from writing. I’m not writing the right kind of material for that. But I’d like to make a contribution to our family coffers. Unlike in the past where I would engage in a lot of talk and wishful dreaming, I have created timelines for completing certain tasks and moving these projects forward. 

They are fluid to a degree – I notice a tendency in myself to set overly ambitious goals with insufficient time allowed for the other necessary tasks of living and parenting – but they are written down and accessible. 

Tenacity is essential in the pursuit of dreams. Coming up with an invention in the endless playroom of the imagination is fun for a time, but eventually you must build a test of concept device if you want to see your invention in the real world. All the ideas in the world are useless if they are unexpressed. In my life I have attracted dreamers and schemers, people with outlandish ideas and plans, people whose ideas sound grand but are rarely realized or discovered, like my early book ideas, too late. 

I’ve been one of these myself. Our closets are full of aborted constructions and the leftover materials of failed dreams. Some of these have been fodder for new ideas, like the lavender sachets that I remade into purses to much greater success. We read so much about the entrepreneurial spirit being the way of the future, prosperity being connected to service industries, solution creators, the marketing of knowledge and ideas. It all sounds like a positive spin on dreaming. 

But dreams are not goals. Goals may spring sprightly or grow ponderously from dreams, but they are not the same thing as the dream. The paths, the stepping stones on the path, the direction of the path – these require more than wishing and desire. 

These require construction, making a map, pouring concrete, defining boundaries, spotting signposts, a consciousness of detours and debate over the value of such. There has to be action. 

Years ago I wrote down my five and ten year plans. Looking back – an essential component to realistic goal setting – I can clearly see those goals I reached, the majority, and those that are still simmering. I can see how my idealistic visions did not take into account the preferences or needs of the family I so earnestly wanted as part of my big life plan. Having a child does change everything. 

The great thing about life plans is that they can be reformed as they develop – and how much simpler it is to change something that is several years in the future than a serious plan for tomorrow. However from this place of distress and failure, I can also assess where I did not meet my goals and aspirations. By failing to maintain even a modicum my attention on these goals they just faded away. It’s not just that these particular projects were shunted to the back burner. They were truly forgotten and switched off. There is a connection between my poor financial situation now and the unintentional discarding of these goals.

I can see where and how the community and network and family that I attracted and gathered around me were positive energizing influences. I can see also where some of these same spirits and individuals have increased my complacency and fed into the worst of my character – that part of me that is lazy, afraid, a procrastinator and able to justify anything, the part of me that fails to inspire, uplift, encourage and exalt others. 

 I have written down my professional goals for this year. I have published these goals on my public blog for anyone who cares to see. I have communicated the posting of these goals on my Facebook page, so that even more people may choose to peruse them. I made sure that they were realistic, achievable while still ambitious. I’m still developing my action plans and timelines, but some of that is already out in public. As I said in my blog post, I’ll look darn silly if I reneg now. More soon.