I wrote. Mostly that is what I did. Poetry for the Poetry Federation of Canada’s all call for submissions for nine new anthologies. The titles of these anthologies have me a bit stumped because they came with no content direction what so ever. The poetry of birth. The poetry of seasons. The poetry of relationships. A wide berth for interpretation could mean just about anything. I chose the pedestrian path and took the titles literally, but alas, it turned out that I had missed the deadline (I think I got the email informing me about it a couple of days prior), so I ended up just picking the best three and sending them to the magazine sponsoring the anthologies.
I also polished another piece for The Daily Globe and Mail on the recent lice saga (which we appear to have recovered from – thank the lord/universe). I am struggling with a piece for Canadian Living magazine. 500 words on My Canada. I am not sure that any part of Canada is “mine” yet, but I don’t know that I can call any place I have ever been “mine” in the way that some people refer to homes or favorite haunts. I feel that the place I will call mine I have yet to step foot on.
I found out that one of my short stories didn’t make the cut for a rather avante garde literary magazine out of Calgary, so I turned around and submitted it to a Sci-fi/Fantasy mag here in Edmonton. Probably a better fit.
And finally, I began scouring my blog for a piece that I might enter in a memoir-writing contest. This in addition to attending a writer’s group meeting where another member supplied me with three more contests that are possibilities.
Oh, and I wrote my first cover letter. Next is the query.
And you know what I discovered about this? That it is fun. More fun than blogging and reading blogs and mindless message board voyeurism. Hmmmm. Rob started a blog the other day on his “net” history and conclusions he has come to concerning it. I still like blogging. It’s not the same as my writing for contests and submissions. It fulfills something different but I suspect that I will not be an everyday blogger once I start to get the hang of how this getting published thing really works. I still like reading blogs but I am down to a certain select few that I read consistently. I really need to start using the RSS.
One thing I did not do was return to my novel. By the rules, I should have begun my read through and second draft about a month ago, but the topic matter is so depressing. I find that even a fictional account of my widowhood too heavy for my soul at the moment. I also did not finish my cat lover story because I want to make it a part of my sci-fi short story series and haven’t found the bridge between what I started and where I want it to come out. Patience. Patience.
I did work on the links to my wordpress blog. I did finally get the ball rolling on getting all the beneficiary stuff changed on my existing pensions. I did find and semi-organize (they are all in one folder) my tax info for 2007.
And…..drum roll……..I got Rob to help me purge and organize the cabinets in the kitchen.
What?! That sounds like a non-important agenda item to you, dear readers? Au contraire, mes amis. The cabinets (like the refrigerator) have been harboring out of date (by years) foodstuffs and all manner of non-used and non-essential items that, if not taken care of now, will simply demand attention when the move to Texas is glaring us in the face or worse, will be waiting for us next summer when we are back to finish getting the house ready for sale.
I have been wanting to do this for a while, believe it or not, but the problem is that I am not always certain when my cleaning and purging help is needed, wanted and/or helpful because much of what there is doesn’t belong to me.
I tread a very delicate line when it comes to rearranging or packing away or pitching. I don’t want to push. I don’t want to dredge up memories or be the cause of hurt feelings where Shelley’s things are concerned. It’s hard for the girls to visit and see so much change. It’s hard for Rob to go through things all the time. And it’s hard for me because I am torn between wanting to help, protect and at the same time start carving out areas that reflect me. Shelley had a distinct décor style that is evident in the plants and wall hangings and color scheme and the way that all space is occupied by something. But for me, plants get dusty and the die when not watered and aren’t all that great for an asthmatic to have around. I like my walls sparse to totally bare. My favorite colors change too often to slap them on a wall, so I usually go with light colors that are barely colors at all. And I like room. I love room. Room to walk around or dance around or sit on the floor with newspapers or writing papers or books spread out all around me. It could just be my lazy Sagittarian side but stuff just invites dirt to settle on it and then it needs to be cleaned. Not much stuff equals way less cleaning. And, I like the freedom that space provides.
Rob and I talked about the cleaning and the impact of Shelley’s things on us both. He had worried about how I felt and honestly aside from one small teary breakdown this last summer, I haven’t been bothered. I worry more about the impact of change and paring down and giving away and tossing on him and the girls than I think about the impact on me. He reminded thought that what I see is a reflection of a lifestyle that he and Shelley were transitioning away from around the time she became ill and that had that not occurred at that time, things would be much different.
It was nice though to clean out spaces. I am beginning to like the downsizing and the lack of stuff. I think now about what I truly need in terms of the material to feel satisfied once we get to Houston, and I realize that it is not an extensive list.
So now it is Friday again. Katy has the day off because of the teacher convention and we are heading into Sherwood Park for the morning. First stop is Beaners, a hair salon for little girls. She was promised a visit during the lice escapade (of which the saga is far from over as a new lice alert pamphlet came home with her from school the other night). Then it’s off to the mall because she is growing like a weed and needs new tights and has Christmas money to spend. I need to browse the magazine rack at the Chapters and perhaps grab a chai at the Starbucks (okay, not perhaps – definitely). Afterwards I need to hit the gym and there is ballet today too.
Whew. A lot done and a bunch still do to do
Friday, February 8, 2008
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
The Internet, Message Boards and Pattern Breaking
I had heard about the “internet” from Jim, a long time friend of mine. We were staying over with Jim and Nancy in Calgary one time when we were up from Kansas visiting friends and family. Jim, whom I view as a bit of a technology buff, was eager to show me this wonderful new thing called the “internet”. We sat for an hour or two in his basement looking at a screen full of nonsensical text (at least it was to me). Remember this was back in the mid-90’s before the advent of the “world wide web” and “internet browsers”.
I remember Jim, after typing string after string of more nonsensical text, excitedly announcing that we were “on” another computer – a “server” - somewhere else in the world. I sighed. I didn’t really get the point of this. Or understand the attraction. I do remember the first thing I ever viewed from the “internet” were actual crime scene photos from the “Black Dahlia” murder. Gruesome stuff, really. Sort of like the black and white crime scene photos I found one time in my dad’s desk when I was a kid, from his time in the RCMP. I also remember Jim remarking that about 75% of the “traffic” on the “internet” was pornography. My eyebrows must have arched at that; I must have thought that this “internet” thing would never last. Little did I know.
Although I purchased our first home PC in 1988, at the start of my fourth and final year in the Chemical Engineering program at the University of Calgary, we didn’t get our first “internet” ready computer until 1997. It was our third home PC, a lower level product of AST, purchased at “The Brick” and was internet ready by virtue of being equipped with a 33.6 Kbps modem. Part of the rationale for the purchase was to do research on a medical issue I experienced in 1997, but part of the rationale was to be able to do “e-mail” and keep in better touch with family and friends. Ha ha, you say, yeah right. Well, it’s a better reason than earlier justifications for PC’s, like digitizing all of one’s cookbooks and recipes and having a wealth of cooking instructions available at the press of a keyboard key. But, I digress.
Even at the stunningly slow speed of a 33.6 dial-up connection we discovered the “world wide web”. And became a bit addicted. It didn’t take long, though, to become a bit disenchanted with slow dial-up and interest and use gradually waned. In setting up various e-mail clients, I was reminded of the existence of “newsgroups”. This was a topic that Jim would go on about from time to time. And I recalled from my University days the existence of “forums” on the University mainframe where one could go and post and have “discussions’ with others about a wide range of topics. So, I made use of my ISP’s newsgroup host gateway and subscribed to a few. I can’t recall how many newsgroups were available back then. Seems like it was around 3,000 or 30,000. More likely the former – it’s almost inconceivable to even want to scroll through 30,000 newsgroup titles. With cryptic names like alt.something.this or alt.something.binary that one had to use a little savvy to find something of interest. I subscribed to a few groups about cars and a few other general interest or curiosity categories. As a sidebar, there were things one could find on the internet – usually photographic – that were really better left unseen and unknown. It quickly became apparent that keeping up with these newsgroups could run into a serious amount of time. And ultimately, after a few comments and complaints from my wife, I rationalized that the time invested/benefit ratio was really too low to continue this sort of activity. There were many, many other things in Real Life that could be, and needed to be, done to allow time to be sucked up by newsgroup reading – and a little posting – on-line. Internet usage dropped off to a once a month session to pay bills on-line and occasional sign-ons to check e-mail. The world wide web held little to no attraction for me. (The same was not true for my kids, however, but that’s another story.)
To be continued…
I remember Jim, after typing string after string of more nonsensical text, excitedly announcing that we were “on” another computer – a “server” - somewhere else in the world. I sighed. I didn’t really get the point of this. Or understand the attraction. I do remember the first thing I ever viewed from the “internet” were actual crime scene photos from the “Black Dahlia” murder. Gruesome stuff, really. Sort of like the black and white crime scene photos I found one time in my dad’s desk when I was a kid, from his time in the RCMP. I also remember Jim remarking that about 75% of the “traffic” on the “internet” was pornography. My eyebrows must have arched at that; I must have thought that this “internet” thing would never last. Little did I know.
Although I purchased our first home PC in 1988, at the start of my fourth and final year in the Chemical Engineering program at the University of Calgary, we didn’t get our first “internet” ready computer until 1997. It was our third home PC, a lower level product of AST, purchased at “The Brick” and was internet ready by virtue of being equipped with a 33.6 Kbps modem. Part of the rationale for the purchase was to do research on a medical issue I experienced in 1997, but part of the rationale was to be able to do “e-mail” and keep in better touch with family and friends. Ha ha, you say, yeah right. Well, it’s a better reason than earlier justifications for PC’s, like digitizing all of one’s cookbooks and recipes and having a wealth of cooking instructions available at the press of a keyboard key. But, I digress.
Even at the stunningly slow speed of a 33.6 dial-up connection we discovered the “world wide web”. And became a bit addicted. It didn’t take long, though, to become a bit disenchanted with slow dial-up and interest and use gradually waned. In setting up various e-mail clients, I was reminded of the existence of “newsgroups”. This was a topic that Jim would go on about from time to time. And I recalled from my University days the existence of “forums” on the University mainframe where one could go and post and have “discussions’ with others about a wide range of topics. So, I made use of my ISP’s newsgroup host gateway and subscribed to a few. I can’t recall how many newsgroups were available back then. Seems like it was around 3,000 or 30,000. More likely the former – it’s almost inconceivable to even want to scroll through 30,000 newsgroup titles. With cryptic names like alt.something.this or alt.something.binary that one had to use a little savvy to find something of interest. I subscribed to a few groups about cars and a few other general interest or curiosity categories. As a sidebar, there were things one could find on the internet – usually photographic – that were really better left unseen and unknown. It quickly became apparent that keeping up with these newsgroups could run into a serious amount of time. And ultimately, after a few comments and complaints from my wife, I rationalized that the time invested/benefit ratio was really too low to continue this sort of activity. There were many, many other things in Real Life that could be, and needed to be, done to allow time to be sucked up by newsgroup reading – and a little posting – on-line. Internet usage dropped off to a once a month session to pay bills on-line and occasional sign-ons to check e-mail. The world wide web held little to no attraction for me. (The same was not true for my kids, however, but that’s another story.)
To be continued…
Friday, February 1, 2008
Thursday, January 31, 2008
The Barbie Coat
My mother made a little pink coat for my Barbie doll when I was about ten years old. She made dresses and pants too. I rescued them from a basement purging Mom conducted the summer before last. She sold many of our old Fisher-Price toys, collectors items that she could have made real money off of on eBay were she not a complete Luddite when it comes to the Internet. The clothes were in an old play suitcase that I used to us when we would take little trips. They were musty from years under the basement steps and Katy eyed them dubiously when I told her enthusiastically that they would fit her dolls. She clearly had reservations about allowing these smelly old rags anywhere near her dolls, forget about on them. But, I took them back to Des Moines with us and washed them a time or two and though a bit tattered, they served.
The dolls’ clothing was a mixture of regular size dolls and Barbie clothes. Some of the doll clothing was for baby dolls and some were made especially for the Crissy and Velvet dolls that my sister and I had gotten for Christmas one year. Do you remember those dolls? The ones with the I Dream of Jeannie knots on the tops of their heads that you could pull the pony tail out for long hair and wind back up inside them with a round knob on the back? My father didn’t understand why any of our dolls needed more clothing than what came on their backs, so my mother ended up finding patterns and buying material, snaps, buttons and ribbons to make doll clothing for us. If my father had known how much the materials cost or the amount of time Mom put into the creation of these tiny wardrobes, he might have just let her take us out to buy the extra clothing for which we were clamoring.
I was reminded of just how much went into each piece when one of the buttons came off the pink coat and needed to be sewn back on. Rob took the tiny pearl-like thing from Katy and immediately handed it off to me, pronouncing it to microscopic for him, and it was very, very small. The head of a pencil eraser is bigger than those buttons. As I worked on replacing and subsequently tightening up the hold on the other buttons, I marveled at what close and intricate work this was with a needle and thread and how skilled a seamstress one would have to be to cobble together such tiny garments on a sewing machine. My mom had a Singer machine in a stand alone desk that she could fold the sewer into before closing the lid atop it. It was rarely every put away when I was young. Mom sewed, it seemed to me, all the time. She made clothes for our dolls, us, and herself. I think there was even one point when darn near everything she wore, she had cut from a McCalls or Butterick pattern and sewed together herself.
The two (miserable) years I spent in 4H, I learned to sew as well, but I never loved it. I found it tedious and thought the clothing made me look frumpier than I knew I was. No one wore homemade clothing when I was 12, except for the halter tops that nearly every girl I knew, younger and older, were wearing but which I was not allowed. I don’t know if it was because I was wearing a bra by then (a training one but according to my parents - that counted) or because I was fat and neither of my parents could stomach the idea of my pudgy (not little - I was already 5’ 6”) self’s rolly flesh showing (and in case you think I might be putting thoughts into their heads, my younger sister was allowed to prance about the neighborhood in halters and bikini tops until we were both well into our high school years). But, I just didn’t see the point of sewing your own clothes unless you were good enough at it that no one could discern your homemade from the store bought. That is just a gift. Mom had it sort of but I didn’t and still don’t.
Mom got her sewing gene from her mother. My grandmother’s doll clothes and tiny quilts still survive and Katy has several of them today among her play things. She likes the blankets especially and I have to admit that I love the fact that they have survived and she is playing with them. Same goes for the Barbie ward robe and doll clothes. There are many kinds of heirlooms but the ones I like best are the things that a person uses and then passes to the next generation for their use too.
The dolls’ clothing was a mixture of regular size dolls and Barbie clothes. Some of the doll clothing was for baby dolls and some were made especially for the Crissy and Velvet dolls that my sister and I had gotten for Christmas one year. Do you remember those dolls? The ones with the I Dream of Jeannie knots on the tops of their heads that you could pull the pony tail out for long hair and wind back up inside them with a round knob on the back? My father didn’t understand why any of our dolls needed more clothing than what came on their backs, so my mother ended up finding patterns and buying material, snaps, buttons and ribbons to make doll clothing for us. If my father had known how much the materials cost or the amount of time Mom put into the creation of these tiny wardrobes, he might have just let her take us out to buy the extra clothing for which we were clamoring.
I was reminded of just how much went into each piece when one of the buttons came off the pink coat and needed to be sewn back on. Rob took the tiny pearl-like thing from Katy and immediately handed it off to me, pronouncing it to microscopic for him, and it was very, very small. The head of a pencil eraser is bigger than those buttons. As I worked on replacing and subsequently tightening up the hold on the other buttons, I marveled at what close and intricate work this was with a needle and thread and how skilled a seamstress one would have to be to cobble together such tiny garments on a sewing machine. My mom had a Singer machine in a stand alone desk that she could fold the sewer into before closing the lid atop it. It was rarely every put away when I was young. Mom sewed, it seemed to me, all the time. She made clothes for our dolls, us, and herself. I think there was even one point when darn near everything she wore, she had cut from a McCalls or Butterick pattern and sewed together herself.
The two (miserable) years I spent in 4H, I learned to sew as well, but I never loved it. I found it tedious and thought the clothing made me look frumpier than I knew I was. No one wore homemade clothing when I was 12, except for the halter tops that nearly every girl I knew, younger and older, were wearing but which I was not allowed. I don’t know if it was because I was wearing a bra by then (a training one but according to my parents - that counted) or because I was fat and neither of my parents could stomach the idea of my pudgy (not little - I was already 5’ 6”) self’s rolly flesh showing (and in case you think I might be putting thoughts into their heads, my younger sister was allowed to prance about the neighborhood in halters and bikini tops until we were both well into our high school years). But, I just didn’t see the point of sewing your own clothes unless you were good enough at it that no one could discern your homemade from the store bought. That is just a gift. Mom had it sort of but I didn’t and still don’t.
Mom got her sewing gene from her mother. My grandmother’s doll clothes and tiny quilts still survive and Katy has several of them today among her play things. She likes the blankets especially and I have to admit that I love the fact that they have survived and she is playing with them. Same goes for the Barbie ward robe and doll clothes. There are many kinds of heirlooms but the ones I like best are the things that a person uses and then passes to the next generation for their use too.
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