I Am This Woman

People often talk about the leap of faith, and act like it is a deliberate act. What I am finding is that one realizes that one has leapt after the fact, in mid-leap when you discover there is air between you and solid ground. Sometimes it’s an airy floaty feeling. Sometimes it’s a sinking “oh shit” feeling. But the most important part of it is not the feeling after the leap, but the feelings right before that next step. And the next step. Those two things in combination - the feeling, or intention, behind the step and the step itself – determine whether or not you float and fly, or plummet and think “oh shit.” (more…)

I made it through this day.

Today was the last day of a job I’ve had for five years, and change is tough. It’s for the better, in that it will be different. And this change has been two and a half years in the making. But change is, as I said, tough.

What helped the most was not the delicious carnitas burrito I had for lunch, but the love and friendship of at least twelve good and decent people who care about me…

What also helped was me winning at Monopoly today after I managed to put two houses on both Park Place and Boardwalk, and nearly cornered the monopoly on railroads. At one point, I was down to my last $8, but all it took was one opponent landing on Boardwalk and forking over $600 in rent. That was teh awesome.

Never underestimate the power of good friends who know your heart and remind you when you lose the way a little. Never underestimate the sheer brilliance of a good board game.

(A birthday card post or three is long overdue. I will get to that over the weekend. Promise.)

I try to live by the motto in the title. This too shall pass. The good and the bad. It all goes by so quickly. This was brought home to me in the early days of my son’s life, when sleep was a somewhat random event and my day was broken up by bouts of crying, eating and diaper changes. A good day was a day I could take a shower and lather, rinse AND REPEAT.

Those days passed quickly. As I watch the hair sprout on my son’s arms, legs and face, I feel it all too keenly.

I learned somewhere along the way never to wish a day to be over, never to wish that some anticipated event that was weeks off would hurry up and get here. There was bound to be something good about the interim, and the event itself would pass quickly and be over as well. There is something to be learned in the interim, some valuable moment, thought, perhaps in preparation for the big thing. These are ideas that I live by, and for the most part, they work.

Except this week. I’m in my last week of a job I’ve had for five years. Most of the time, I have loved the work but not loved the job. There have been aspects of the job that I loathe, and parts of the job I shall miss. I would go into detail but maybe I’ll save the juicy details for my memoir, or that “tell-all” fictionalized version.

As I move into the next phase, I find myself lethargic, burned-out from stress, underappreciated and unmotivated. This too shall pass, but for once, I wish it would move a bit faster - the goodbyes, the closure, the getting past the inevitable sadness and awkwardness of the whole thing. I’m ready for the good parts, for the new stuff to happen. And I’m ready for the being glad that this is all over now.

But first, I still have work to do, boxes to pack and things to cross off my list.

(36 of 50)

You know, even if we didn’t make it to all the “perfect” places in Austin, we made it TWICE to see my Knitting Guru, and that was solid gold.

She is a woman I met when I started attending the UU church and discovered that I was indeed a lifelong Unitarian but just didn’t know what to call it all those years. In 1995, I was pregnant and wanting connection, so I volunteered to teach Sunday School, after Guru J chatted me up and I discovered that we shared similar teaching philosophies.

I began to live for the days when she was able to stay after church talking and gabbling with me until we were embarrassingly the last folks to leave the parking lot, stomachs grumbling for lunch.

Eventually, I found my way to her house, which was filled with books and yarn and music and love. I soaked up the time with her, and mentioned that when I was 40 (which I regarded at the Age At Which Everything Would Be Over), I would take up knitting again. She looked at me a little askew and said, “why wait? I’ve been knitting forever since I was about 8 or 9.” Oh.

So I took up needles and tried again… and fast forward two years, and I have a baby in tow on the way to Australia on a lark, and my Make-Mistake-Snake on the needles on the plane. I completed this lovely snake toy for my child, having learned much about tension, switching from purl to knit and back again, dropping stitches, joining seams, slipping the first stitch on the row and counting each row each time to see that I did not drop a stitch.

Many thousands of conversations, games, visits, food, stories, books, yards of yarn and years later, and we were sitting around her table again tonight, talking a blue streak right up until I had to run out to dinner in order to get to sleep by 11 or so. And still we have conversations, knitting work and stories to finish and show/tell each other another time.

Tonight, I showed her my very favorite birthday present, a compilation art technique book that someone gave me thinking it wasn’t much of a gift, but it was better to pass it along than to toss it. OMG, both of us raved and drooled over it for an hour. She said, “Oh my, I LOVE THIS. It gives me SO many ideas!” EXACTLY! That’s the magic of it!

Such a treasured friendship. I am truly blessed, and to that she would say, “oh well, you know, it’s just what we do, isn’t it? No big deal. Glad to see you anytime!”

And later, my darling child said, “J is so sweet.” Why? I prompted. “Well, she just UNDERSTANDS what I’m into. She listens.”

Wow. Yes. That from a 12 year old who is priming himself for a typical but very non-conformist teenage (just like all teenagers). For both of us, we have a role model for very different (but really just the same) reasons. And that is just awesome.

Now all I can think of is what should I make her! I have a very good idea. Heh heh…

(32 of 50)

Four days before my 50th birthday, I am getting a mammogram. It is my second. Yes, I know that I should have started at 45 and gotten yearly ones. But I am a slow adopter, and I confess to having a modicum of anxiety about the whole “breast sandwich” thing.

But then I had my first one. And IT WAS NO BIG DEAL. I think that we need to stop catastrophizing these routine procedures, which in many cases, SAVE LIVES. (More later on the colonoscopy.)

I am going to a new clinic today, but last time this was the drill: wait in waiting room (aptly named) for a bit, ignore all the people who are getting more dire diagnostic exams/tests, read Reader’s Digest from 1999 (an article about Y2K). When name is murmured barely above the din by laconic technician in candy pink scrubs, sound like an old fart and say, “WHAT? Did you call me?”

Get instructions for the fifteenth time about undressing from the waist up. “TAKE OFF EVERYTHING. Did you wear deodorant?” Um, no because 75 people in your office told me not to. One woman made a special phone call to impart this wisdom. Regardless of the fact that I don’t *wear* any products with aluminum in them, and have a very simple system of bra-and-shirt, I suppose they get really tired of having to specify to people that they need to remove their nipple piercings.

The clinic I went to has a special little waiting area for the topless-but-gowned ones. The magazines are only a month old. I read People and probably discovered that some former TV star had died and I hadn’t heard about it.

When you get called into The Room, the Express-Lane Effect starts. By this principle – that whenever I get into an Express Lane, it backs up because the machine is down, or there is a price check required – I will get the technician with the coldest hands.

And the most fun is the little tape pasties they put on you (cool! they come in floral now!). “No, I need to place them.” The tech scrutinizes your boobs, selecting just the exact center of your nipple for reference.

Then the breast sandwich is done, with two plates (which are cold, no surprise there) that come down to “gently” mash your breast tissue as flat as possible so the x-ray gives as accurate a picture as possible. Yes, it hurts but it lasts for about 20 seconds. The tech says, “Hold your breath!” to which I gasp, “No problem!”

Repeat that three more times. There are two views taken – one vertical, one horizontal, two boobs. So, 80 seconds of unpleasantness, some cool, high-tech pasties and the off-chance to detect breast cancer early while it’s treatable.

Not bad.

(29 of 50)

Call me “Four Eyes.” Actually, I have bifocals, so that would be “Six Eyes.”

One part of aging is the inevitable need for glasses. This started for me in my mid-30s when I was in graduate school and reading a lot. But I didn’t believe it. I look back and see the truth now. However, at the time, I thought it was just overuse (which it probably ALSO was). Lots of reading in grad school and not all of it can be done at optimum ergonomics.

Finally, around 42, I succumbed to getting some “cheaters” as they are called, and it rocked my world. (more…)

Memorial Day Weekend, originally uploaded by tigerwillow.

(26 of 50)
Some days, you have to work. Some days, you need to play with Sculpey. And sometimes you just have to ride the rollercoaster.

(25 of 50)

June is my favorite month of all. Not just because my birthday is in the middle of the month, but because it’s usually the beginning of summer holiday, it’s warm and sunny (or stormy) but never cold. Rarely is it cold. (I know it’s cold int he mountains and elsewhere in June, even snowy at elevation, but that’s not where I live.) I do NOT like cold, esp. not in June.

June tastes like fresh peach ice cream. Like key lime pie. Like hot dogs with relish and mustard.

June smells like green lawns, sweat and sunscreen. June sounds like the South, bugs buzzing, birds and squirrels chittering.

June has soft, short nights with quiet clouds blowing around the sky while the moon peeks down.

For me, June is all too short but oh so sweet.

(24 of 50)

It’s been a week on the new system for sp*m removal, and it seems to be working. I have missed several days of blogging, but then again, one strives for quality not quantity, right?

Although, I am reminded of something a very good friend says (and maybe he’s quoting someone?): “There’s a certain quality to quantity.”

New developments:

• I rode a rollercoaster! Look for actual photo evidence soon!

• Graceful Crow Media has acquired a digital audio recorder with a very easy interface for transferring files into the computer. Expect plenty of nonsense audio soon.
• Yardwork is nearly complete. I will take one more set of interim photos, then the plants go in tomorrow. After that, I hope to have some nice pix with loads of “curb appeal.”
• I had pancakes/syrup for breakfast - a break from my usual high-protein yoghurt, fish or chicken, or chaste bowl of cereal. And I think the pancake coma is about to do me in, complete with catnap and really horrible dream about a friend who rejected me years ago. In the dream, she returned and silently gave me back some knitting I’d done for her. Knife to the heart. Made the pain of losing her friendship fresh again.
• Stupid dreams.
• I’ve received EIGHT (8) CARDS already! SQUEEEEEEEE!

(20 of 50)

I am not sure what is going on, but I’m getting some really huge bunches of spa*m, and some of it is suspicious. I need time to investigate.

It really irks me to have my content stolen and put on a spammer’s website as a “blog entry.” Just because I mention a keyword randomly that someone else is homing in on, that does not mean that my entry is worth linking to another blog, which is really just a robotic compendium of stolen content veiled as “ooh, check out this blog entry” with a pingback.

I had some content stolen from an defunct and archived website. I have no recourse because the owners of the website have closed up shop and disappeared for all intents and purposes. Or they may have sold the content…. against our agreement. I still hold the copyright to the content, which are some personal stories that I’d rather own and get credit for? but the links are all 10 years old and broken, so I’m getting nothing out of the “mention” and the content is polluted because it’s on a spammer site.

So I need to rethink my whole rationale for doing what I’m doing. Maybe it’s a Word Press issue, maybe it’s not. I don’t know. I will have a solution or workaround in a few days, hours.

Thanks for reading. (I’m ticked off about this too because I had a semi-big announcement - a drawing for prizes!)