Mind your own happiness, thanks.

July 23rd, 2010

( Orpha’s birthday cupcake-love)

We should try never to let our happy frame of mind be disturbed. Whether we are suffering at present of have suffered in the past,there is no reason to be unhappy.  If we can remedy it, why be unhappy? And if we cannot, what is the use of being depressed about it?  That just adds more unhappiness and does no good at all.  — His holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

The good news and the bad news:

Much ado about HAPPINESS this sunny season.  First, it’s summer… and that’s supposed to make instant Happy, right?  No school.  No alarm clocks.   I am home with the kids for the summer, and that’s a really happy thing.  For me.  Mostly.   The kids however are having a harder time keeping their happy on.  I mean, it’s HOT, right?  And everything EASY FUN to do equals money, it seems.  It’s a challenge.  Things that seems perfectly fun to me are met with “groan, not today….”  So, I am trying to just let it be.  I am also attempting to pursue some ideas even when met with the gripes, in hope that it’ll catch on.

Me?  I am totally into the “life’s too short” thing right now.  It is hard to balance the things that bring happy with the things that ought to be done category though.  I had a huge fit of battle with this incongruence after we got home form the beach.  On vacation, even with kids along :) , there is a great deal of “scheduled enjoyment.”  You plan meal times, walks, beach time, sightseeing… all (hopefully)without the crap of life.  You come home and POW!  the normal crap du jour is waiting plus whatever you avoided while away.  I tend to get way bogged down in that.  I am trying to get better at NOT.

Here’s my plan for penniless joy.  I am trying to give this a place in my ocd list of the day.  ( You make those too, right?)  To list the billions of things that I want to get done, and to include some joy.  I never do that.  It’s usually what is allowed after the list is exhausted for the day.

This is all very shorthand– You can fill it out and make it meaningful for you.

The PLAN

~BE in beauty

~Notice what’s  right in front of you.  All of it.

~Do something NEW.  Learn a new something.  See a new something.

~Read

~BE with a friend, or someone you love.

~Count yer blessings.  Really.

~MAKE. Create. Art. Something useful.  Something awesome.  Something good to eat.

~ Be inspired.

~ Change something.  Make it better.  Or just different.

This is a work in progress.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  Please– let me know if you have any summer home-runs… I’d be glad of it!

I’ll leave it with this…

“Sounding the same call for joy whenever possible, the Hebrew sages say that when you are first welcomed into Heaven, a record is revealed to you of all the many times in your past when you could really have been happy and really enjoyed some moment but failed to do so, and then you are called to repent of each and every one of those moments.”

THE P.S.

Oh my STARS!  It has taken me a week to write this one damn post!  In the meantime I have had a stomach/gi virus that is just killing me!  So I am getting caught up on lying around, and doing some baby knitting, and I just started a book last night called The Geography of Bliss– One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Place in the World.  I’d picked it up at the library last visit along with some travel books to research all of the travel that isn’t happening this summer.  The book is pretty great thus far…

Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, has covered a multitude of catastrophes and maladies from more than 30 countries over the past two decades. For The Geography of Bliss, however, he decided to tell the other side of the story by visiting some of the world’s most contented places. his site

It’s funny and thoughtful and often wise.  I was drawn to it immediately because  I ( and many of my dearest) have had so many years of  “happiness resides in _____, and we just need to find a way to move there.” :)   Fill in your choice–  you probably know what I mean. So if you have fits of that sort of thinking, or are having a little wanderlust epizootie, like myself, you may want to check it out.

I think Jimmy said it best–

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Summahhtime

July 23rd, 2010

So, wow, it is zipping along, this summer.  Four and a bit of weeks left until I return to the Montessori Kid Factory.

I’ve been so crappy about taking pictures and  blogging.
Here are a few shots from the road thus traveled.  Be on the lookout for more soon.  And flying pigs, probably.

I will do my best!

Shangriladidah on 94th st.

Lily’s learns to KNIT!

The new family member– Bob the budgie– bequeathed to us by the neighbor Bob, who is not a budgie.  Here is the Bantam pecker who roams his yard, is NOT our pet, and drives all of Reisterstown crazy.

The Mid Atlantic Hedgehog Show

Both girls got awesome ribbons for being awesome Jr. handlers.  It was a fun day.  Sort of like a hedgehog pageant and olympics rolled into one!

The Artscape and peanut adventures ( see Jim for more)

Lastly, here’s Punkin all doozied-up.

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Waterworld!

March 13th, 2010

This time last week, we were discovering that we had a water problem.  A water problem that became increasingly  annoying as the days dragged on.   I took FOUR IKEA bags of dishes away to hand wash one night.

Yep.  It was five days with no water.  Cut into some daily living convenience for sure– and made for some creative cooking and toilet-time in the house.   Erin, best-girl-next-door, saved the day with a call early on to teach us that you could flush the toilet with melted snow from the yard.  :) No school for the kids. Trying to find something half decent to wear to work that won’t be noticed immediately by the up-close room of preschoolers. Barrettes and pirate girl hair.  It was a challenge.

I really appreciate water in my pipes more than I ever knew.  It was a giant water main break. Something like 3 million gallons were lost over 12 hours before the leak was discovered.  There was a great quote over the course–

Baltimore County’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. “You don’t know how much you like water until you’re affected.”

Yes.

I guess I have to feel really lucky if my biggest complaint was that it was getting in the way of my wool-dyeing time.  But it did.  The water came back, and it is officially SPRING BREAK for my job, so back at it!  I am spinning like a dervish and dyeing up a storm of color in 11th hour preparations for the yarn party next weekend.  I will be posting pictures soon of some of the really nice yarns and fiber blends that have been flowing.  I have been experimenting, and really liking the results.  Next time photographic evidence and a YARN & FIBER GIVEAWAY for the Yarn Party!

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Harp recital 09

December 5th, 2009

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My Actual Thanksgiving

November 29th, 2009

Happy to you.

Made paper chains today counting ALL 26 days left.  gulp.

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Day of the Dead, Day of the Living.

November 2nd, 2009

We had a seriously fun day of celebrating our dead folks today.

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In our family, we are still working to establish meaningful traditions and rituals~~ holiday and otherwise.  It’s more difficult when your family is all spread out over the east coast.  It just isn’t automatic for us.

We, the gnomes, have nary a speck of Latin in us….  We do love us some Day of the Dead though.  I think most folks we know do as well.  For one thing, it is so beautiful, and mysterious, and just a little bit scary & macabre, right?

It was so nice to spend this day with the Foster-Jewell family last year.  Though is isn’t a holiday born of our particular heritage, it is one we really enjoy celebrating.

Honoring our departed friends and loved ones.

I think it keeps on through tomorrow, All Saints and then All Souls.

Beyond all of those pretty sugar skulls and loverly marigolds, it’s a really good opportunity to talk with  kids about their ancestry,  plus do a bit of good “circle-of-life” conversing.  The poppets are pretty sensitive, and it became a bit overwhelming for them to talk about after a bit.

There are oodles of craft opportunities. It’s kind of fun to go through the momentos and photos, to remember and share stories and then to gather them all up in one big gorgeous assemblage of life and death.

We had a Chinese food picnic and sangria /tamarind jarritos. Also some bread o’ the dead and of course, Halloween candy.

For the children there are candies and fruits; for the adults, cigarettes and tequila. For everyone there is the hope of having our loved ones at our table once again, sharing for a brief moment of our time as we know it…

~~Oscar Guzmán

No Tequila.

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Frida got baked, however.

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and some boney breads.

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Here’s the recipe we used.

Pan de Muerto, “Bread of the Dead”

In celebration of Mexico’s Day of the Dead, this bread is often shaped into skulls or round loaves with strips of dough rolled out and attached to resemble bones.

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 5 to 5-1/2 cups flour
  • 2 packages dry yeast
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon whole anise seed
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 4 eggs

In a saucepan over medium flame, heat the butter, milk and water until very warm but not boiling.

Meanwhile, measure out 1-1/2 cups flour and set the rest aside. In a large mixing bowl, combine the 1-1/2 cups flour, yeast, salt, anise seed and sugar. Beat in the warm liquid until well combined. Add the eggs and beat in another 1 cup of flour. Continue adding more flour until dough is soft but not sticky. Knead on lightly floured board for ten minutes until smooth and elastic.

Lightly grease a bowl and place dough in it, cover with plastic wrap and let rise in warm place until doubled in bulk, about 1-1/2 hours. Punch the dough down and shape into loaves resembling skulls, skeletons or round loaves with “bones” placed ornamentally around the top. Let these loaves rise for 1 hour.

Bake in a preheated 350 F degree oven for 40 minutes. Remove from oven and paint on glaze.

Glaze
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/3 cup fresh orange juice
  • 2 tablespoons grated orange zest

Bring to a boil for 2 minutes, then apply to bread with a pastry brush.

If desired, sprinkle on colored sugar while glaze is still damp.

We also made a batch where we mixed orange juice and zest into the dough as well as the glaze.  Both breads are yumm-oh. :)

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Halloween, everyday.

October 31st, 2009

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We had a Coraline and a devil-in-a-red-dress.

More dark houses than not.

What gives with that?

Happy to you all.

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How to build a cage for a guinea pig with super powers.

September 18th, 2009

Oh the joy that is guinea pigs.

Dear Esme got some friends this summer.  The girls in my life are thwarted in their quest for normal pet-gratification.  See, we have asthma here, and allergies, and housecleaning issues, plus their parents are just plain mean.  No cats, no dogs.  We do have Hedwig the cockatiel, and Esme the gypsy hedgehog and now a trio of wonder-pets known as cavies, Cavia porcellus, and the unbearably lovable species guinea pig.  (Click for a wiki that tells amazing facts about them.)  They keep different hours from Esme, so she doesn’t much bother about them.  Hedwig on the other hand is M.A.D. about them– and I’m not talking the quirky british “mad” either! Anyway….

We adopted them from a person who could no longer keep them.  I only meant to take 2, but could not leave the 3rd family member behind.  I am so glad because he has turned into a great friend for this husband I happen to know– who thought he was probably way too grown up for a guinea pig. :)

Meet them!

Ms. Daisy

Frida Kahlo

Mr. Panson

They are pretty awesome.  Very sweet natured and they make the best sounds.

So after a bit of research online, we thought maybe they should have bigger homes.  Apparently GP’s need a lot more room than most commercial cages provide.  So we found some great information on building something called a C&C cage.  The c’s are for “cubes and coroplast”.   It turned out to be a really fun and relatively cheap way to provide the piggies with a happy-pig sized home.  We even built little Esme one and she is also loving her new larger sized home.

An “extra large” cage from petco is approximately 30″ x 30″ and will cost you well over $100.  MOst of the ones sold are not extra-large.  Guinea pigs will put up with living in small spaces, but they are much happier with more room to play. The minimum cage size recommended by cavy experts is 7.5 square feet for one animal and 10.5 for 2.    We built a double decker cage, with space of 28″ x 56″ roughly 10 3/4 square feet each cage.  The girls live downstairs, with Panson (the bachelor) up in the penthouse.

The directions on the above link are so great that I recommend you look there for the specifics.  Plus they have a bewildering photo gallery of the many architectural wonders that people create and send in.  Very inspiring and entertaining!

The cubes you can get at Target or many other places…. They are meant to build storage shelves and run around 12-15 dollars a box.  It took four boxes to build our monstrosity plus Esme’s cage.  The coroplast is a little trickier.  It is not especially hard to find if you live near any kind of sign shop.  It comes in a 4 x 8 foot sheet and costs around 30 dollars.  It is really easy to cut– and you assemble the “tray” for inside of the gridwork using just packing tape!  It was easy as lego.  We added some zip-ties just for a little overbuilding reassurance.  Again, super cheap.

In progress…

finished

with a new fleece technique and some doozied up hammocks.  Fleece is a great alternative to the mess and cost of more conventional beddings.  I am really happy with how it is working out and they seem to like it too.  Again, we also switched Esme, and she totally digs burrowing around in the softness.

The piggies were so happy!  The super clincher on having a cavy is this wonderful thing they do called “popcorning”… it is a sort of seizure of happiness.  Here is a cute look at someone elses piggies demonstrating:

All in all, the not-really-a-pig experience is really great.  We would have sought them out long ago if I’d known what great pets they make.  They are great with the kids, snuggly and hilarious!  They are available at pet stores, of course– but there are MANY MANY in shelters, rescues and on places like craigslist.  A good source for inspiration and helping out an animal who may really need a home is www.petfinder.com.  Please check one of these sources if you are considering one!

I leave you tonight with my crazy child’s latest design– superhero capes for cavies!!

It’s SUPER DAISY!!!

Get your orders in now!

Now that we have survived 2 weeks of the germs involved in returning to school and retail, I promise some knitting/spinning content next!  PLUS phase two of giant mushroom construction– that project also fell under the germ-spell.

More soon!

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The reoccurrence of me.

August 26th, 2009

I believe this is me returning from my bloggy-sabbatical. You know, the one I forgot to mention. :)

Quite the whirlwind summer it was… Almost literally one day.  A few days after my last post in fact This is what the sky looked like.

Not so whirly it turns out, as just straight ahead shearing.  We had a storm here that rocked everything.  It was pretty scary.  We did ok, just more branches falling around us, but in other areas around us it was really awful.  Check out the video on here if you have never heard of a ” micro- burst” storm.  I sure hadn’t.  Hope I never have the pleasure of meeting one again either!

Although some residents have speculated that the damage had been caused by a tornado, the storm’s radar signatures definitely matched that of a microburst, said National Weather Service meteorologist Andy Woodcock.
“Microbursts can do the same, if not more, damage than a tornado,” he said. Straight-line winds usually knock down trees from the base, unlike a tornado, which twists and rips trees, he said.
Straight-line winds form when updrafts push water droplets higher and higher in the clouds, where the water can get so cold that it freezes, Woodcock said. “Eventually it’s got so much mass in the top of that cloud that the updrafts can’t support it anymore,” he said, and the water and ice come shooting down.

“It takes the air with it,” Woodcock said.

yeesh.   So, let that be hereby recorded for blog posterity… More of the GOOD summer  next.

I have been lying around with what I suspect is the flu today. Not the GOOD PART really, but it has given me time to upload a bunch of pictures and think about blogging again.  The girls and I have been reminiscing about summer in these last few days of vacation before school on Monday.  It has been a mostly REALLY good one.  We’ve had lots of nice time with family and friends, and adventures plenty.  I need to rest my achey-breaky head now– but more words on the way.

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Back again. BIG Summer Sale!

July 25th, 2009

( clickable)– Thanks to jim for helping.

I have been at the beach again.  With the whole family this time– hedwig and esme too!

Besides that…

I had my kitchen “stealth-cleaned” by the dear Erin while I was away last time. ( you KNOW that is a wunder-friend!!)

I cleaned my fridge. Every little bit of it.

The pool is up ( and has a lot of walnuts in it)

I painted the poppets room. Alot.

I carded and am spinning the jacob fleece from MDS&W.

Am making progress on the tiniest pair of pink socks ever, the nightsongs shawl and the beach-begotten pink lacey-leggy socks.

I promise to fill in the blanks with pictures in the next few days… it is summer, after all.  I am busy living the life. :)   Summer goes by in a blink.  Almost unbearably so.

xoxo

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