Jan 10, 2008 | This Life, Thrifty Goodness
What did you thrift today?
Can you believe it’s Thursday already? We’re 10 days into the new year, how are all of you doing on your New Year Resolutions?
In these parts, we skipped the traditional naming of resolutions. Like a lot of holiday traditions this year, it went by the wayside. I’m sure we’ll pick it up again next year, but this year, we were just relieved to see the calendar numbers flip, content to let 2007’s resolutions ride.
Last year’s resolutions included getting skinnier. Both in how much we consume and physically. (We also banned house-guests for the whole year. Oh, that was controversial. I lost a few friends who saw their free Bed and Breakfast close down. Personally, I’d like to be closed for business indefinitely!) I’m in no mood to chat about the weight loss stuff… as terms like BMI and the diabetes get me in a whole passel of trouble. Besides, you just have to know I have a REAL rant coming down the pike on that eventually. And without naming names, I’m won’t be pulling any punches either. Which might be the only New Year’s resolution I made, if you count the aftermath of December’s Debacle— no more mealy mouthed Wende. Some truths need to be said—malevolent lurkers be damned.
But that’s another day. Further afield, perspective in hand. Today, I can speak clearly about our reducing on the consumption side, specifically packaging. That’s been fun! Retail produces so much packaging, it’s shameful. There is only so much you can recycle—so a thrifting I have gone. Less retail, less in the landfill. It’s included so much Thrifting that somehow I started a small, not for profit (evidently, Oh!!Oh!!Oh!!), business that keeps me more distracted than I like. And again, another post.
The upside of all my thrifting is that it benefits my family in small ways. We are a family of three. Odd numbers are the Kabbalah of thrift stores; it’s why a lot of things get donated. Sets are missing members, fours become threes and in the process useless to bigger families. Their toss is my gain. I snatch up sets of three constantly—napkins, napkin rings, plates, cups. . . Holy Trinities of reusable goods.
We’ve used fabric napkins for ages. Down with paper, I say. I do have a stash of paper napkins—take-out refugees that I keep on hand for when masses of small children lay siege and demand sticky treats. But for family dinners, we use cloth. And to keep germs at bay, we keep our napkins marked with napkin rings. I picked up this little set of hand-carved wood rings for just 25 cents. A fish. A whale. A pig. We’ll argue about who has to be the pig later. When we’re done, we just tuck our napkins back into their markers and leave them in the yellow bowl. No fuss, no muss.
In the long term, it’s not a big deal, a small effort really. But as Mother Teresa once said, “We can do no great thing, but only small things with great love.”
Jan 9, 2008 | This Life
Oh, January! Your lack of light is trying my patience and has me scrambling for any sunlight I can find. Much like my sunbeam seeking dog, I’ve been following the sun around the house, setting up shots in the strangest of places. This photo was snapped in my master bath! I was all excited too, thinking I’d found a new source of decent light. Smug and content, sure I’d discovered Nirvana or at least a solution, until I uploaded the photo. Cringe.
It’s not just my imagination running amok, January’s dim light has been pressing my photo editing skills to their limit too. No amount of tweaking seems to do the trick—and it’s making it hard to keep Thrifty Goodness stocked. I’m not complaining about sales, but every sale means I have to find something new to list, and listing something new means getting a few decent photos. Photos are everything on etsy and lately, the sunlight has been a black-market commodity. You see my problem? So, I edit and I tweak and I set up shots in strange places, hoping for a miracle in the rain.
Rain, rain, rain. That leaves a girl little choice but to pilfer her sweetie’s stash of tea, specifically his tin of Paris tea. Goodbye Vanilla Comoro, so long Chocolate Vitale. I drank it all. I had to; it’s dreary these days. And about the only way to deal with the constant drizzle is to be fully armed with a cuppa of something hot and fragrant. A girl needs to drown her misery some how.
This tin is nearly empty, too. Poor guy. If he was smart he’d hide his stash. I bought him this tea for Christmas and then I promptly drank it. Clearly, I’ll need to be replacing his tea and mine (don’t feel too sorry for him, his favorite tea is green tea and he has a year’s supply of that! Of course, I won’t touch the stuff, which is why he has a year’s supply of it.) and I would love a few suggestions on how to banish the rain. If you have a tea you adore, leave me a comment. I’m looking for other sources of liquid sunshine.
Jan 7, 2008 | This Life
It tried really hard to snow last night. Because we’re on the top side of this particular hill, our street probably saw the best of that attempt. Snow can only mean one thing in these parts: Snowball Fight!
I have no desire to get wet and cold and somebody needs to photograph the event, so I stayed perched on our tangy porch. Snow is so rare here on the Oregon Coast, we’ve never invested in snow gear. The boy just ends up borrowing a too-big-for-him pair of gloves and slipping plastic bags over his socks before putting on his shoes. I insist on the hat, because I’ve become my mother, “You know 90% of your heat escapes from you head, right?”
IZ and Boy Wonder are both very intense warriors. Not much smack talking goes down—but I suppose it’s hard to aim, throw, duck, and diss your opponent at the same time. Of course, I would never let that stop me from inserting an appropriate photo caption.
“Bring it you scruvey dog!” shouted Captain IZ Sparrow wondering why his head was so cold. Didn’t he used to have to hair?
“Oh, I’ll bring it all right. And I’m a homo sapien not a cannis lupus familiaris. Clearly you need to have your eyesight checked.” Boy Wonder hadn’t learned the fine art of smack talk and his parents won’t let him swear yet.
“Not the face, not the face!”
“Not the nutz, not the nutz.” (Narrator’s aside: Ok, I swear, I’m not making this stuff up!)
“That’s pretty good, Dad, for a guy mom says can’t dance.”
“You and your camera!”
“Hey, someday you’ll be happy I made you stop and take a photo. Somebody has to capture all this for posterity.”
“Not at the house!!” (Photographer’s note: check out that snowball in mid-air. That’s not easy people!)
“Seriously? I just told you Not. At. The. House!”
“Uh. . . seriously, no?”
Well now people, I think you’ve seen enough to know the snowball fight has come to a conclusion. I don’t know if it was the Great Snow of 2008, but we’re claiming it as great fun.
There’s only one thing left to do:
Jan 4, 2008 | This Life
The wind is howling again. I’m sitting here at 8 pm with wet hair, tempting fate. If the power goes out, I’m in deep weeds courting a cold. I like to live on the edge.
Except, not all that much—living on the edge. Today, with the rain and the wind and the misery, OH MY, I’m not liking on the edge one little bit. There are other edges of the world, edges further South, edges with sun baked sand, warm mostly tropical edges calling my name.
After 2.5 years the novelty of living in the Wild West has worn off. December damned us all, I tell you. That’s a month I don’t want to relive—and I bet if the Baby Jesus had any idea it was going to be hell month, he would have been born in March. It’s not that I’m completely discontent here–because I’m not. It’s that my heart isn’t in the rain and the wind and the misery. It’s really not in the fact I can’t get a freakin’ contractor to come out and fix my roof. Which has caused us to coin a new phrase— every time we bump into another one of Astoria’s idiosyncrasies, IZ and I look at each other and say, “What are you gonna do? Freakin’ Astoria.”
It’s like that. And that’s the way it is.
But then there are moments. Standing on my tangy porch in the darkness of December ending, listening to an orchestra of ships sing in the New Year. Wind howling, blowing through my thin sweater, chilling me to the bone, and a warm arm around my shoulders. A crowded river on a clear night, the town a natural amphitheater, listening to a score that could only be written for a New Year. It could be a Dvorak symphony, this odd harmony floating up from the water. Everything glistening new. Everything promising hope. In that moment, all is well.
The trick is stringing those moments together. . . until I don’t have to any more.
Jan 2, 2008 | This Life
The time off was too short to be therapeutic. But I did walk away from my blog, my email, even my camera for a week. Other than Thrifty Goodness photos yesterday, I’ve not shot a single photo since Boy Wonder’s birthday on the 22nd. Other than a few emails to people who were owed, nary a word was typed. No photos on Christmas (apostasy!), no photos on New Years (that’s for your benefit!), no words, no thoughts, no nothing, baby. Clear minds. Silence.
I’m willing to let that be it.
IZ is not. Any suggestion I might take an indefinite hiatus is met with arched eyebrows, “Uh, that’s not a good idea.” Apparently, some of you aren’t willing to let me quit either. Nudge, nudge, ouch! I have to tell you though, a week away doesn’t seem long enough. But a month wouldn’t seem long enough either; the difference being that if I took a month I wouldn’t come back at all. So, here I am. One foot forward.
What I did do was a whole lot of nothing. I tried to sew once. But the sound of my sewing machine is an alarm going off in the head of Boy Wonder. There is some psychic connection between that machine and my child’s need to barrel up the stairs and ask me a million questions. Questions I can’t answer. Questions that leave me frustrated. Questions that lead to me being a melty mess and wondering exactly where his father might be at this precise moment. I threw in the towel, cleaned up my space, and plopped down in front of etsy. Etsy is my new best friend, just so you know.
I did get some sleep. Considering the days leading up to the holiday this is a good thing. IZ and I also listened to an inordinate amount of back episodes of Law and Order, Cold Case, and Without a Trace. All of which aren’t really shows we regularly watch, so most of it seemed new to us. Occasionally, we would look up from our computers when the voice-over narrator would say, “these are their stories. . .”
IZ: “Have you seen this one?”
Me: “Uh, nope!”
And back to looking at etsy we’d go, listening to the TV in the background. You avoid an amazing amount of gore that way, just sayin’. Ok, so, I went back to etsy. What IZ was looking at, I don’t know—except every once in awhile he’d send me a link to property in Santa Barbara. Like a motion picture with a soundtrack, my mind would go whirling to a moment when I was happy, to a place that keeps me sane. And nothing else compares. Home, home, where I wanted to go.** And these are my stories. Click, click, click, into the wee hours. No words, no pictures. Me and etsy, we’re BFF.
Over coffee one morning, IZ and I had the following conversation:
Me: And while I’m on the subject, can I just say that I hold an unhealthy hatred for those celebrities that have babies and then have perfect bodies 6 weeks later. Hatred I tell you.
IZ: Yeah, well, you need to remember those women spend an inordinate amount of time, not to mention money, in the gym and on “procedures” to get those bodies.
Me: Who has that kind of time???
IZ: Yeah, well, they also don’t have etsy.
Wonder what his point is exactly, she thought sarcastically.
These are my stories. No more, no less. I’m back. I’m putting one size 8.5 foot in front of the other. No promises one of them won’t end up in my mouth, though.
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Jan 1, 2008 | In Photos, This Life
