Yarn junkie

The cat is starting to make herself at home, finally. I'm pleased. I think.

It started last week. I got up (after deciding I could not hit the snooze button any more and still expect to have time to take a shower) and shuffled across the room, aiming for the light switch. On the way my foot stepped on something fuzzy and unresponsive. And large.

"The hell?"

I flipped on the switch to find I was standing on a skein of blue and red alpaca yarn that I bought last year and still haven't done anything with. It should have been in a box in the craft room, not in the middle of my bedroom floor. I turned to the cat.

"Why is there a skein of very expensive alpaca in the middle of the bedroom?"

She sat on the edge of the bed, gazing at me in wide-eyed innocence. If she could talk I'm sure she would have said, "What is this 'alpaca' of which you speak?"

I picked it up, put it back where it belongs, and went on with my morning routine.

That evening I came home from work to find: a skein of red wool on the stairs, the alpaca skein in the kitchen, a square from an unfinished afghan in the bathroom, and a skein of Noro (a Japanese wool/silk blend) by the nightstand. It's been a couple skeins a day ever since, and not always the same ones. I think she goes box-diving and then plays with what she fishes out (I noticed early on that she really likes boxes). Last night there was a skein of Zauberball sock yarn (wool) and a ball of kid mohair on the bed, pushed up right against the pillows. She must have dragged them up there to sleep on them. I'll say this for her, she has good taste. She never touches the cheap acryclic stuff I use to practice stitches with. The other stuff must smell a little like the animals they came from.

Well, if she's gonna go crazy over yarn, she'd definitely in the right house.

Side note: "kid mohair." Doesn't that sound like the name of a rapper? Can't you just see him in low-slung jeans, cock-eyed hat, loud jewelry, and an argyle cardigan? Of course, he'd probably spell it Kid Mo' Hair.

This sounds like fun

Found this through Ry and Arts and Dafts. On the 10th of October this year, take a picture and upload it to the 10/10/10 Flickr group.  Then take a look at what everyone else posted.  The idea and the Flickr group belong to Heather Champ, a really good photographer that I just got introduced to when I clicked the 10/10/10 link on Ry’s blog. 

You can take the picture at any time on the tenth.  But…would it be overkill, do you think, to take it at 10:10 on 10/10/10?

Fruits of my labor (day)

I have this memory of my Mom and Grandmom making jelly in Fall. It’s a compound memory, I think, because I only remember one instance and Mom says this happened every year. I was far too little to help. I sat at the kitchen table, probably with a coloring book and some crayons, while they moved back and forth between the sink and the stove. The kitchen was full of the smell of jelly cooking. That’s mostly what I remember, the smell. Like bottled grape juice, only much more intense. They got the grapes from an arbor my Grandpop built behind the garage.

“Do you remember that time the yellow jackets got drunk?” Mom asks. “We’d picked grapes the night before and left them in plastic bags on the porch. Next morning, the bags were buzzing and moving. Full of yellow jackets, but they were so drunk from grapes left in the sun, they couldn’t even sting us.”

I remember hearing about it. I must have been there. I can see it in my head, but I don’t know if I remember the event or the story.

It’s been a while since I had a Concord grape. I pop one in my mouth as we're washing them. Sweet first, then sour. The sweet seems to come from close to the skin, which is tough. The flesh is green, sour, and chewy. Definitely not a table grape. Mom puts a grape in her mouth too, and the taste of it triggers a memory about her great grandmother (who was very old when Mom was very young. She walked with a cane). She thinks maybe she used to watch her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother make jelly. So we're carrying the tradition from farther back than I thought.

“Maybe we should save some of these seeds, make an arbor here,” I suggest.

Mom says arbors are generally done from cuttings. Growing from seed takes far too long. Grandpop got the cuttings for his arbor from the people who lived across the street from Mom's aunt. These folks had a couple of outbuildings, one of them a barn (always a horse or a cow or some livestock living over there), and along the side of one of the outbuildings was a grape arbor.

Mom and I grew up in the same area, 20 years apart. As she’s telling me where Grandpop got his grapes, I’m silently comparing the Trevose/Langhorne of the 1950s and ‘60s with the one of the 1970s and ‘80s. Livestock, farming, as a matter of course? There was only one working farm left in the area when we moved away in 1986. Then I put both of these towns next to the very, very citified version that exists today. It’s a place I had a hard time recognizing when we were down there for my cousin's wedding.

"When seeing a Jaguar in the parking lot of the Shop 'n' Bag becomes commonplace," my aunt once said, "it's time to move." She lives in Virginia now.

"I think I'm getting a little too enthusiastic with the mashing, here." I say. "There are purple flecks on the sink. And the drainboard. And the wall. Oop! And on my shirt."

"Oh, that's all right. It washes off the sink and the drainboard, and the wall's getting tiled eventually. That's just a primer coat. Your shirt, though..."
"Ah, it's not an important shirt." Now it's the Grape Jelly Making Shirt.

Because I'm the one who wants to learn how to do this, Mom is hanging back, giving directions. She'll demonstrate something, then hand it over to me. This was, after all, my idea.

There it is, the smell I remember. It happens shortly after the grapes start cooking. It fills the house.
"Man, I wish I could take a picture of that smell," I say. Best I can do is take pictures of the grapes.

As we're setting up to strain the grapes, something pops into my head--a strainer made of cheesecloth suspended from the legs of an upside-down chair. But that wasn't for grapes. Apples?

"That was for apple jelly," Mom says. "I used to use cheesecloth until I broke down and bought jelly bags. They wear like iron, and they're reusable."

For making the grape juice we use this big wooden shillelagh-looking pestle in a big jelly bag-lined sieve. It take a little while, but I eventually get a nice rolling rhythm going. It ends up being what Mom thinks is a little over a gallon of juice.

Mom describes jelly-making as a really good activity for the working woman. You don't have to go straight from grape vine to jars in one headlong rush. After we make the juice and cover it, we're done for the day.

The next morning after breakfast, we get serious. All the jars, lids, and rings get washed. The jars get put in a big kettle full of water on the back burner, to be boiled and thereby sanitized.

Time to break out the pectin. While the pot on the stove talks to itself, Mom has me read the pectin packet's recipe for grape jelly, as well as all the steps I'm to go through to get this stuff in jars and processed. There are instructions in the Ball canning book too.

Thank goodness they both say the same thing. The last thing I need right now is conflicting information. And, according to the chart in the canning book, since we're on a mountaintop somewhere over 2000 feet we have to add five more minutes to how long we boil the jelly once it's been jarred.

"So what would they do in New Orleans?" I ask Mom. "They're below sea-level." The chart makes no mention of low altitude cooking.

"I have no idea." She admits.

My Dad comes through the kitchen, dog right at his heel with a toy in her mouth.

"Getting started? Sure hope this batch doesn't make our teeth turn blue."

Mom made a batch a few years ago, her first since moving upstate (I think) and it did indeed turn your teeth blue if you ate it.

"That was the weirdest thing!" Mom says. "I still don't know why it did that." I silently hope it's not something to do with the grapes grown in this region.

Mind you, the threat of blue teeth didn't stop anyone from eating that jelly. You just had to be extra vigorous with the toothbrush afterward. And no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for school or work lunches, unless you wanted people to stare at your mouth all afternoon.

Once the water starts to boil, the timer gets set for 20 minutes, and we start to make the jelly. The idea is to have the jelly and the jars ready for each other at the same time. Another smaller pot of water has been set to boil for the lids. Must remember next time I do this, even though the jars get boiled, the lids do not. That weakens the rubber seal. You just want them hot and loose. After the water gets boiled and turned off, that's when the lids go in the pot.

As before, Mom directs the cooking from over my shoulder. I keep thinking of that mantra they recite on so many of the home improvement shows: "Learn one, make one, teach one." I guess by then you know it really well.

The timer goes off just in time for me to set it again for the jelly. It has to do a hard boil for a solid minute. The foam is starting to form. The recipe says to skim that off at the end, right before jarring starts.

Actually, the recipe calls it "scum," like it's pond algae or something. Mom says it's just air bubbles.

"It's still jelly, it's just not as pretty," she says. We skim the foam off and put it in a custard cup. I see a couple slices of bread in that foam's immediate future.

Now comes the part of this whole procedure that made me nervous to think about. Processing the jelly. Jars get taken out of the big pot -- we start with two, so that there's an assembly line going. After that, one jar gets removed at a time. It's to retain sterility.

The big-mouthed funnel goes into an empty jar, jelly fills the jar to about the start of the threads on the lip. Funnel gets moved to the waiting jar, lid comes out of hot water and onto full jar, screw on lid. Put full jar out of the way, take another jar from the pot. Now fill the jar that has the funnel in it. Keep on going until you're out of jelly or out of jars.

We manage to get 8 full jars of jelly from this batch, plus some extra that we put in a jar with the "scum." We decide it's time to stop for a taste test. We call Dad in to the kitchen so he can have some too.

Ohhh. This beats the heck out of store-bought jelly. The first bite brings back another memory from when I was little, of Mom making me a cream cheese and grape jelly sandwich. It must have been with homemade jelly, because I haven't thought of it in years.

"My mother used to do something when I was little," Mom said. "She'd make me a cream cheese and jelly sandwich..."

"I was just thinking of that! You used to do the same for me."

By this point, I'm starting to feel indignant for the slighted cloudy bits of perfectly good jelly, and decide to rename it "skim." Mom concurs.

After the taste test (thumbs up all around), it's time to process. Mom assures me I have no reason to worry.

"Now, if we were using a pressure canner, that would be a different story. Though they've made some improvements in them over the years. Getting jelly on the ceiling used to be a common occurrence with pressure canners in my mother's day."

"I'd rather not use one of them," I say.

"Me neither," Mom agrees.

But this procedure is pretty tame. Six jars in the hot water bath is all that will fit in the pot without the jars touching. After the water comes to a full boil, it needs to stay in there for 15 minutes (10 minutes normally plus five more for high altitude). Then take those out and boil the rest. Leave the rings on until they're sealed.

I spend the 20 minutes after the jars come out of the water listening for the "sssspop!" that let me know they have sealed. They all do just fine.

Mom does the next batch, herself. We still have 3 quart jars full of juice after the second batch, and Mom decides to process them so that I can use them later. I should get 2 more batches of jelly out of them, plus another 2 cups of grape juice that I could probably use in cooking or something. She sends me home with a dozen jars -- the 8 I processed, 1 to replace the skim jelly in the fridge, and 3 more. I'd bought 12 jars from Wal-Mart, and guess she wanted them all filled for me.

You're not supposed to store them with the rings on, because sometimes the rings rust shut. I keep them on for travel, though. Not really interested in having a jar come unsealed on the bus.

For some reason, probably because I was little when I first saw Mom and Grandmom do it, I thought making jelly was really hard. It isn't. Which makes sense, really. If it were that difficult, so many people wouldn't be able to do it. But to a little kid it seemed like magic--take grapes from the back yard and turn them into something that doesn't look at all like a grape? Amazing.

Learn one, make one, teach one. I guess this means I have to make more jelly soon.

And, no, there were no blue teeth this time around.

Snicker

Still piddling about with that post. I'm trying to make it less of a blow-by-blow description of how to make jelly (bo-ring! Though I will be doing that with the photos on Flickr. Mainly for me, so I don't forget what we did) and more about the conversations we had around the whole jelly-making thing. Was a big bonding moment, I think. Which is great, 'cause that's what I was hoping would happen.

But in the meantime, an LOL cat that had me snickering. Love the expression on the panther's face:


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Snapdragon

You may be noticing a significant lack of the post I said I was going to put up yesterday. Yeah. Instead of the writing I planned to do, I spent the weekend goofing off. One of the things I did? Bought yarn I don't need with money I don't have, and am now trying to figure out what to do with it. I wonder if I have enough for a sweater?

But anyway, here's another picture from Labor Day weekend:



It's a volunteer snapdragon that's decided to take up residence in my Mom's ground pine. I liked the way all the needles around it seemed to be pointing at it.

Conversation I keep having with the cat

Sophie: Mrrrrowwww? Mrrrrrow! [Rubs her face on my arm/knee/foot/whatever body part is available] *
Me: [petting cat] Y'know, you live here now. There's no probationary period. You're in. You can relax. You don't need to be on your best behavior. Go on, release your inner diva. Be the little princess I know you want to be.
Sophie: Mrrrrowwww? Mrrrrrow! [Rubs up against me again]
Me: [sighing] Okay. Maybe tomorrow.

*Translation: "You're my best friend."

Foxglove

I'm writing a post about my weekend that I might actually publish before the end of this weekend. But in the meantime, here's a picture of the foxglove in my Mom's garden.

Scenes from the chair, or, The dentist makes me thirsty

“Uhm,” I say to the dental tech as she covers me with a lead apron, “I just want to warn you. This might take a while.”

“Oh?” She asks. She is hooking this H-U-G-E thing to a little bracket and approaching me with it. It looks nothing like the bitewings they’d used at the office I used to go to. Is she planning on putting that in my mouth?

“Yeah. I have a really strong gag reflex. I mean really strong.”

“Oh, that’s all OK.”

“No, seriously. I’ve had techs get mad at me because of it.”

“Really?” She is sympathetic. “That’s not right. Okay, open up.” Yes indeed. She thinks that thing is going in my mouth.

“What’s this?” I ask, cocking my head at The Great Big Thing.

“Oh, it’s digital. The picture will show up over there.” She shrugs to the open laptop behind her as she tries to position this piece of equipment in my mouth.

“Arggggggarrrrrggle, bleah!”

“Hm.” She steps away, the Great Big Thing still in her hand, now much wetter.

“Yeah.”

She tries again. I gag again.

“Let me try something else.” She disappears and comes back with Something Else on the bracket.

“The film is a little smaller than the digital device,” she explains while fitting it in my mouth.

“Sorry,” I say after gagging and spitting it out.

She leaves again, and comes back with this blue foam thing she wraps around the bottom edges of the plate. I guess she’s thinking maybe the sharp edges are the problem.

Place, gag, spit out, repeat. This happens three times before I manage to hang onto it long enough (chanting dontchokedontchokedontchoke in my head, punctuated by the occasional no! when my mouth tries to get rid of this foreign object) for her to set up the machine and sprint out of the room to hit the button.

“There, that wasn’t so bad,” she says as she comes back in the room.

“Pwaaaah.”

She catches the thing as it leaves my mouth and goes to develop the film. She returns a few minutes later as I’m telling the dentist what’s up with my teeth, a look somewhere between dread and apology on her face.

“It didn’t come out. We’re going to have to take another X-ray.”

-----One week later-----

Back in the chair again. The problem I originally came in for has been fixed, now we’re doing some sort of general inventory of my teeth. My last dentist has sent over my records, including every single X-ray they ever took. The entire office is impressed with me because of this—that particular dentist is famous for not giving complete records. They want to know what I said to make him give them everything. I'd love to oblige them, but I can't remember the actual exchange.

Before the dentist gets started, they have to take panoramic X-rays of my mouth. I’m not fussed.

“Those don’t bother me,” I tell the tech. “It’s the bitewings that give me grief.”

She looks at me oddly.

“But that thing where you stand up, put your chin in the bracket, bite down on something, and the machine just kinda wraps round you and takes pictures? No problem.”

“Yeah, those are great….but we don’t have one of those.”

Oh, God. We gaze solemnly into each other’s eyes.

“Bitewings?”

She nods.

“I hope you don’t have anything else to do this afternoon,” I sigh.

The procedure goes like this: Set-up, gag, remove, set-up, bite-and-concentrate-while-she-sprints-for-the-button, buzz, gag, spit, repeat. About a third of the way through, she calls the dentist in.

“Could you help us out, please? Hit the button the second I clear the door?”

“Did you try numbing her tongue?” He asks.

“Yes. Doesn’t work.”

“What about salt?”

“Salt!” She leaves my field of vision. “I forgot about salt!”

Salt?

She hands him a Q-tip. He rubs it on my tongue. It tastes like plain table salt. He places the film, then sets up the machine. And the clouds part, the light shines down, and the angels sing. I feel like he could take all day to set up if he needed to. There’s no gagging, not even a hint of it. This feels perfectly fine. They both leave the room, she takes the picture and they come back. I’m still holding it in my mouth, marveling at how not bad this feels. He takes the film out of my mouth.

“That’s amazing! Salt did that?”

“Yep. Or maybe I’m just that good.” He winks, smiles, leaves the room, and the tech continues taking pictures of my mouth. She has to salt my tongue before every X-ray or I choke--we experiment with salting every other X-ray and the results are not good.

When I finally leave the dentist’s office, I am extraordinarily thirsty. I stay thirsty until about Saturday. Four days later.

-----One week later-----

I am back in the chair for a cleaning and the filling of a cavity in between two of my upper back teeth. The cleaning takes a while because I haven’t been to the dentist in a few years (lost faith in the other guy, teeth didn’t hurt until the middle of August of this year, so I never got around to finding another one). At one point I think they’re done with the scraping part and are about to move on to the brushes.

“Done with the metal hook?” I ask.

The dentist leans over me with another, smaller hook.

“Oh,” I say.

“You know what this metal hook is called?” he asks, waving it at me. “A sickle.”

“Awesome,” I squeak.

“Though in my hands, it’s a gentle sickle.” He winks from behind the mask.

After the cleaning it's time to fill the tooth. It’s waaaaay back there in the upper part of my mouth. I’m tilted back in the chair so far I feel like I’m hanging upside-down. There’s a drill, a hose, some kind of padding, another hose, all in my mouth. I’m okay with it until he puts a metal band around the tooth and starts to pack in gauze. Oh, here we go.

“Uh-oh.” He says. He starts taking gauze out. It’s not helping. I make some sort of inarticulate noise, an attempt to speak.

“Hang on!” He takes out more gauze.

“Thawngkt?” I say. Then, more clearly, “Thalt!”

“Salt!” The tech dashes into another room and comes back with a little cup of salt and a Q-tip.

Rest of the filling goes fine. Gauze, metal whosit, equipment…hell, they could have put everything in the room into my mouth and I wouldn’t have gagged.

I think they’re going to have to make a notation on my chart to have salt nearby for every visit. And I’m going to need to remember to carry a great big bottle of water with me to the dentist’s office.

Well, that didn’t happen, did it?

Sorry.  Still haven’t finished that other post.  And it doesn’t look like it’ll get posted any time this weekend, either.

I’m headed to my parents’ place in a few hours.  They have dial-up, and I finally remembered to deactivate my AOL account last April so now I have no way to sign on up there with my laptop.  Their computer is very slow and uncooperative.  I don’t know if it’s the machine or the server.  In any event, it’s going to be a low-tech weekend.

That suits me just fine.  I need some time just chillin’ on the porch with my folks, some knitting, and the dog.  I’ve been having a bit of a Time at work lately.  The projects I’m working on have me getting a bit bored and grumpy—there’s a lot of repetitive processes—and something just got dropped in my lap because a) it’s a lot like what I’m already doing, and b) it started out as a small favor but has morphed into a Beast That Will Not Stay Fed, and c) I’m kind of a pushover when someone runs to me in a panic with a deadline they don’t think they can meet.  I am starting to wonder if when all these projects wind up I’m going to even remember how to do my actual job.

Sophie hasn’t been around me long enough to be suspicious when she sees me do laundry then pack it into a duffel.  She’s asleep on some brown paper at the moment.  That cat.  I buy her toys, she’d rather play with the ring from the milk bottle.  I buy her a cat bed, she’d rather sleep on a towel, or on packing material from some box or other that came in the mail. 

She’s a cutie.  We had a game for a while, called Shoot the Mousie under the Entertainment Center and Cry ‘Til the Human Fishes It Out with a Bamboo Knitting Needle.  Guess how it’s played?  When I got sick of doing that, I found that the phone book fits perfectly under the TV stand, and that’s where it lives now.  It acts as a backstop, so now the mousie bounces back out when she bats it under there.

I have a pictures of her now.  I’ll upload some when I find the thing that lets me do that.

Off I go to pack.  I think the dryer’s finally done.  Have a good Labor Day, everybody.

There's one coming, I promise

My mom said she was gonna stop reading my and my sister's blogs because she thought she was an inhibiting influence. We had to tell her no, go ahead and read them, it was fine. And then I had to 'splain that I get creative spurts. Cited May through July as proof that sometimes I just don't write much.

I am working on a post at the moment. I hope to publish it tonight.

I found a down-side the the Windows Live software -- while it will pull a draft post down from the blog and let me work on it, when I save the draft after some editing, it doesn't then replace the old draft with the new draft in Blogger. That means I can't work on it over my lunch break, save it, download it onto my laptop, save it, and then work on it some more at lunch...unless I bring my laptop to work. I don't want to start doing that. After the incident last October where $60 walked out of my purse while it was here in my cubicle, I don't bring anything valuable to work. Definitely don't want the laptop growing legs.

Sartorial complaint

To the young man walking down the sidewalk in front of me this morning on my way to work: Son, I'm prepared to take on faith that you're wearing underwear. I don't need to see it. Pull your damn pants up.

Thank you.

Aigh! The dentist!

This an email I just sent to my team:

Hi gang,

I have to go back to the dentist this afternoon to check on last week's boo-boo tooth. I'm leaving at 2:30, and I think I'll be back by 3:30, but I don't know what other adventures he has planned for me besides this follow-up visit. Here's hoping I don't leave there with a numb mouth. Again.
--V

Please send happy thoughts towards Central Pennsylvania, would you? I'm hoping he'll just look at the Tooth in Question and let me go, but there's always a possibility that he has car payment coming up sees something else that needs attention.

Everybody try to act natural

I called my mother this evening to thank her for my birthday present, which got here today. Rosewater perfume from Crabtree & Evelyn. Yum.

During the course of conversation she let it slip that since my sister and I started all this BlogHer talk, she's been reading our blogs.

My reaction:

• Uh-oh. My mom reads my blog?
• Quick! Is there was anything on here I'd be embarrassed to have her see?
• You know what? I'm fine with it.
  

Hi Mom! (waving) Look, everyone, it's my mother!

Better living through chemistry

Scene: The library where I work. It's my morning break, and I'm using it to return a book that's due today. No more renewals allowed, so I managed to do what I normally can't and finished the book the night before (I have trouble reading books I don't own. But that's a story of another time). I come up to the lending desk, smiling and humming.

Woman behind Desk Who I Know Slightly: Good morning.
Me (singing out): Morning!
WbDWIKS: You are entirely too cheerful for 10 AM on a Monday.
Me: Oh, that's caffeine. Nothing natural about this. All caffeine. (pausing for a second to think) And sugar.
WbDWIKS (laughs): Well, that's all right then.

We(e) little fish

There was a session at BlogHer ’10 on Saturday that I am kicking myself for not going to.  It was called “Little Fish in a Big Pond – Understanding and Loving Your Small Blog.”  I wound up not going partly because of time mismanagement (again. That plagued me all weekend.  Not like I have clock on my cell phone or anything), and partly because I felt  I didn’t need help understanding or loving my small blog. 

But now after reading this post about the session I’m really wishing I attended, and not only because one of the people running it was Celeste, whose blog I read and comment on and who comments here once in a while.  Found her blog through NaBloPoMo a couple years back, met her in person for the first time at the People’s Party on Thursday night. 

Luckily BlogHer has transcripts of the sessions, and after a quick search I found the one for “Little Fish…”.  I started skimming through it and berated myself for not keeping better track of time, and for deciding not to show up late to the session even though lateness appears to have been totally acceptable.  There was a lot of stuff in here that I guess I needed to hear.  I’m having a lot of “me too” reactions for things like:

• Why I don’t have a counter. Numbers don’t interest me. If I go by the people who’ve commented on a regular basis, I think I have an audience of about ten, give or take.  And I’m happy with that.  If I somehow managed to attract a readership as large as Maggie Mason’s or Jenny Lawson’s or Eden Kennedy’s, I think I’d be paralyzed by stage fright.
• Why I don’t want to “monetize” this.  Turning this into a paying gig would suck all the joy out of it.  Sponsors would have expectations.  The only reason I’d ever contemplate allowing advertisements is if the site that serves my blog started to charge me for the space I use.  Even then I might not.  There are worse things to spend my money on.
• Why I’m ambivalent about the whole “giveaway” thing.  I occasionally toy with the idea of giveaways, but not to generate traffic.  I just wanna be able to give my friends free stuff.  I realize there’s probably a trade-off, there.  One can’t give away things like KitchenAid appliances or Nooks or whatever else people hand out without there being some sort of business arrangement in the background.  It would depend upon the arrangement, I guess.
• Who I write for.  I write for me.  If other people like it, great!  So far no one’s left me a comment that reads, “You suck!” (oop!  Tempting fate there) so I assume I’m entertaining.  But really?  I’m happy just talking to myself.  Sometimes I write posts just to jot down things I need to remember—like the one on fixing my faucet.  When I finally need to do that again, I’ll find the post that says I need key grease and which direction the cartridge has to go, ‘cause I’m sure I’ll forget by then.

Well, now I’m going to go back and read the transcript in-depth.  I guess things I need to add to the “do” and “don’t” list for next year’s conference are: “Do keep track of time. Don’t worry about walking into a session late.”

Because it's never too early to stress out about Thanksgiving

I just spent part of my lunch break writing a preliminary to-do list of things I need to get done before Thanksgiving, complete with parenthesized notes and commentary:

• Fix downstairs commode (parts already purchased).
  
• Fix kitchen chair that you broke with your toe, for pity's sake (need wood glue, twine, brown paper).
• Refinish craft room chairs (supplies hiding in craft room).
  
• Compose and distribute Thanksgiving menu (consult your shiny new copy of The Joy of Cooking).
• Test some recipes for Thanksgiving (use up that frozen turkey breast that's been hanging around for a year; try the apricot whosit you want to make for Dad because he can't eat cranberries. Need cumin).
• Shampoo sofa and "freecycled" recliner (rent upholstery cleaner).
• Either shampoo or replace living room rug (Resolve and a long-handled scrub brush might do for this year. But really, it should be replaced with something that looks more like an area rug and less like the jagged-edged remnant it is. Something that isn't packing-taped down in the doorways by the previous owners might spruce the room up a bit, you know?).
• Rearrange furniture in living room (because now you have some, and it's all huddled together in one corner like a group of people sharing an umbrella. In other words, get rid of the boxes!).
• Is there time to sort out and arrange the craft room? (Probably, but what does this have to do with Thanksgiving?)
  
• Fix cracked, spackled bit under window (need spackling tape).
• Buy a new roasting pan & rack (preferably one where the finish from the rack doesn't rub off on the food. Gross. And possibly dangerous).

Yes, I really do write myself notes like I'm writing to someone else. It helps. And it amuses me when I look at them later.

BlogHer ‘10, continued (sort of)

You know what?  I just read a post by ThreeSeven that makes anything I have to say about BlogHer ‘10 seem trite and a bit frivolous.  Please do go read it.

I would like to say, though, that the Keynote for the International Activist Blogger Scholarship Recipients was particularly moving and thought-provoking.  I tend to take my own freedom for granted, and these women’s stories put my little piques into sharp relief.  These women?  They have difficult lives, they live in difficult situations, and they are doing something to change it.  And because what they’re doing is so dangerous, there was an embargo on taking their photos during the keynote.

Attend a BlogHer Conference. Check.

I came, I saw, I wanna go again next year.

Things I’m going to do next time:

• Make and bring business cards. Everyone had them. I wound up using my phone to email myself a list of people’s Twitter handles and/or blog names.
• Wear more comfortable shoes to the dress-up events. The ones I bought were killing me. While walking back to the hotel from happies at the Volstead (a few blocks away) I was tempted to kick them off and walk stocking-foot down the sidewalks of Manhattan.
• Take more pictures. I took some with my phone, but I could have (should have) taken more.

Things I’m not going to do next time:

• Be so shy. Oy. I could write a book on this one bullet point alone. I need to remember that everyone is there for similar reasons—to get away from the keyboard, get out from behind the screen, to meet fellow bloggers face-to-face. We all want to talk to each other.
• Leave my camera in the hotel room. It does me absolutely no good when it’s sitting in its case. Though I did get some good shots from the window of room, like the one below. I don’t think I could handle a terrace 20-30 stories above street level, could you? I think I’d be clinging to the walls.

• Leave the badge on the kitchen table! Granted, they did have a kiosk called “Reprints” just for people like me. And I did meet nice people in the line. We had 45 minutes or so to get to know each other. Still. They went to the trouble to print the thing ahead of time so we wouldn’t have a 45-minute wait in line.
• Bring something to do during "down time." I brought an embroidery project I started last month. Didn't touch it once, except to move it out of the way to get at other stuff in my suitcase. Down time? That's when you sleep.
  

The sessions were great. I’ve already started putting into practice some of the things I learned – like that picture above. The original picture was a little cock-eyed, because the building in question was down the street and the terraces were a few floors below me. Here, let me show you:

Unsettling, isn’t it? Like all the furniture’s about to tumble over the edge of the railings and into the street below. And everything looks kind of faded, too. Not quite the way I remember it. I know how to fix the color, but I thought I was stuck with that tilt. Until someone mentioned Windows Live at one of the Geek Lab sessions on photography, that is. Then they demonstrated it. It does cool stuff. One of its features? It straightens pictures. I clicked one button and went from the picture immediately above to one that had the building straight up and down!

Better still? I don’t even have to download this. It’s been hanging out on my laptop for over a year, waiting to be noticed.

I’m going to introduce an Ideas Jar in my house--an idea from another one of the sessions. I will put words and phrases into it—cut-outs from magazines, quotations from books I’ve read, stray thoughts I have that I manage to write down before they leave, things like that—and when I get stuck for material I’m going to take something from the jar and work with it. I may grab the camera and work it out that way. I may write. Dunno.

I also had an idea for a joint blog I’d like to do with my sister. I don’t know if it’ll pan out. More on that later when (if) it develops.

I met lots of great people. You might notice some new blogs in the blogroll to the right of this post. Arts and Dafts is an art blog by Ry, an artist from Brooklyn. She takes great photographs, among other things. And then there’s Feast After Famine, by Dana in Washington D.C. She used to be a journalist, struggled with infertility for a while and beat it into submission. She has four children now. And then there’s Amiee of mamieknits. She lives in Los Angeles, is a knitter, a mother of twins, and an absolute maniac on the dance floor—I’ve seen that last part with my own eyes. She reminds me an awful lot of one of my best friends from high school (who is now an Air Force wife living in New Jersey. Are you out there, lurking?).

I met these three at a BlogHer meet-up at the Volstead. I’ll write about that tomorrow, because it’s quarter after ten now and I really should go to bed.

In an unrelated note, I put eggs on to boil before I started this post and forgot about them until I heard something go “click” in the next room about 20 minutes ago. All the water had boiled away. I’m lucky I didn’t set the house on fire. Can you burn hard-boiled eggs? I guess I’ll find out when I can touch them without losing my fingerprints.

Home again

My mind is reeling from this past weekend. What an amazing time! I am going to blog about it, but not today. I'm still processing the whole thing.

I know this much, though. If I can swing it, I'm going next year! San Diego next time.

Better start saving my pennies now.

Day 2 starting soon

In the morning, after a breakfast for people new to the conference, my sister and I went to a really good session on how to stoke your creativity. There I sat at a social media conference with my laptop in my tote, taking notes with pen and paper. I am hopelessly old-school in some respects.

After lunch I wandered around the exhibits halls for a bit. Favorite booths so far: the Honey Board and Playskool. Playskool gave me Weebles. Remember Weebles? I begged for them for Christmas and got some weird wooden toy people instead--not Fisher-Price people, something else. All I remember is that they were a family, the mother was red, and they had some sort of van they all fit in. I thought Santa misunderstood, or didn't watch TV (Sing it with me, folks, "Weebles wobble, but they don't fall down!"), and that's why I got these. Being a fairly easy child to please most of the time, I shrugged and played with those things instead.

They also gave me a canister of black Play-Doh, and -- one of the weirdest giveaway items yet -- Play-Doh scented perfume. And you know what? It smells great.

Back to another session in the afternoon about taking better pictures. Most of the women in there had DSLR cameras. Mine's a point-and-shoot, but they said you can do most of this with a point-and-shoot camera as well. It was mainly about the "rules" of photography -- composition, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, Dutch angles, lines. Someone had told me some of these things before, but since I hadn't been taking notes then everything except the Rule of Thirds fell out of my head. The Rule of Thirds, incidentally, is that the most interesting thing in the picture should take up 1/3 of the picture. Centering things makes them less interesting.

The Voices of the Year keynote was great. They do this every year. People nominate bloggers for a particular post they've written over the past year, a committee chooses the best, and then those people get up on stage and read their posts aloud. I mismanaged my time a little, so I only caught about 2/3 of the program. They were all very good. There was one about a woman meeting Holocaust survivors in an airport, and introducing them to her friend's grandmother, who had been in the same camp at the same time. That one made me reach over and hug my sister.

That night there was a gala in the ballroom, an art display (for an auction that's going to start online on Sept. 15), all sorts of stuff to make and do. We got to the make/do part after everything was over, but that gave us as much time as we wanted to look at all the art. All the proceeds of this auction are going to benefit Gulf coast clean-up.

This morning we have a presentation by/for the International Activist Blogger Scholarship recipients, and then I'm going to a session on how to improve my photos through editing. After lunch I'm going to troll through the expo hall I didn't get to yesterday, and maybe visit the sponsor suites. Someone came up to me and invited me to one of them. Said something about giveaways for readers (all four of you), so I'm gonna look into it.

One thing that really surprised me was how friendly everyone is. Strangers walk right up to you, say hi, want to know what you write about, where you're from. They hand out cards with their blog info on them (I keep kicking myself for not doing that. I'll have them next year). There's a very egalitarian atmosphere.

And then I wonder why I'm surprised. This is what we're here for, to connect, to talk to each other, to find like-minded folks, to grow and learn.

Yesterday after breakfast they announced where next year's conference is. San Diego. Time to start saving my pennies. I want to do this again.