Tag Archives: family

The Blank Page: Analogy and Reflection

Posted on October 14, 2011 | 10 comments

Good morning Everyone!

Have you ever thought about the possibilities inherent in a blank page? Every single book ever written began with one, even the Bible. A page is anything that is written upon, physically or electronically, which includes all medium from leather hides, cuneiform clay tablets, papyrus, paper, computer screens and napkins and paper towels (for those of us like me who are organizationally challenged and can’t find paper all the time when they need it.)

A blank page can be intimidating, especially when a deadline is looming. It stares back at you, unblinking, demanding that something be written on it. At my work, it usually is demanding that something be written on it quickly, with accurate legal citations, and adequate evidence to prove my point. When I am just writing, as I am now, sometimes it gives me a softer, gentler stare, reminding me that I can write about anything that I want, and sometimes the stare challenges me, telling me I can do better and it’s time to start writing.

One typewriter Ernest Hemingway used to fill blank pages

A blank page can be comforting. Each one is a new start, a new opportunity, a chance to write something that no one has every written before. With each one, the possibility exists that the magic inherent in the written word will strike, and that elusive combination of words that goes straight to the hearts of others and makes them laugh or cry or think, that makes those particular words matter and live on past the immediate moment of their writing will be formed.

Kayla at what can only be called the "heirloom typewriter" for our family.

A blank page is both malleable, and inflexible. A blank page, once I write on it, will let me erase the words I have previously written and start over again, if I need to, (with the exception of leather hides and cuneiform clay tablets; that’s more complicated) but I always reach a point where I am locked in to what I have written, and the story or brief acquires a life of its own.

Kayla, during her first Christmas ever with us.

I think that’s one reason that children are fascinating. At the very beginning, they seem to be a blank page as well, but a blank page that, as it grows, like any good story, takes on a life of its own. I have noticed that with Kayla. While I see her growing into being her own wonderful person, I can see traits that mirror traits that Mark or I have, both good and bad. She can be very flexible, at times, and absolutely intransigent (I can’t imagine where that stubbornness comes from! Family members, no laughing please) at others. She has been participating in writing her own story from the blank page that she started as, and as both a writer and a watcher of it, I can’t wait to see how it turns out!

Kayla driving the Southern Star, our dolphin cruise boat, this summer

Have a great day everyone!

Nancy

10 Comments

Posted in Reflection, working mom, Writing

Tagged blank page, books, children, Ernest Hemingway, family, paper, words, working mom, writing

Random Thoughts, Part Deux

Posted on October 13, 2011 | 12 comments

Good morning Everyone!

Here are a few random thoughts/questions.

1) Where is Old Zealand?

2) Why do we have New York, New Jersey, New Bern but not New Birmingham?

3) Did you know there is a road in California called Zzyzx Road? I passed the exit for it once when I was a child. I also thought of it as the end of the road!

4) Spell check is really unhappy with the term “Zzyzx.”

5) There are nine cities and towns named Atlanta in the United States. They are located in Georgia, Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, Missouri and Kansas.

6) If there is anyone out there who works full-time, has a child/children, commutes over 30 minutes each way to work and is not perpetually tired, could you please let me know how you do it?

7) People who search for the terms “basset hound/Siberian husky” are NOT very good at explaining why they are looking for the information. It’s driving me nuts!

8 ) Never let the copier at work know when you have a project that has to be completed that day. If it knows, the odds of it breaking before the project is finished go up astronomically.

9) It is even more important to keep your computer in the dark about projects that have to be completed that day.

10) I can’t speak French. I hope that I have spelled “deux” correctly and that it does mean two and not something else.

11) Mandy is a great footwarmer.

12) Science has proven that it was, in fact, the egg that came first and not the chicken.

13) There is nothing much funnier than watching a 90 pound dog with legs he’s not very good at controlling rounding a corner at full speed on a wooden floor and losing his balance because he can’t get traction. (Picture Darwin in a Scooby Doo cartoon.)

14) The expression on his face once he recovers from the slide is even funnier.

15) The expression on Mandy’s face when he loses traction and she doesn’t is funniest of all!

16) If you decide to make Christmas gifts, and they’re not finished by December 1, give it up and go ahead and buy them instead and save the hand-made gifts for next year. Your life will be much easier.

17) Why isn’t an in-house masseuse a regular perk at businesses?

18) If it is a choice between your job and your child with a very high fever, the child always wins. He/she makes a lot more noise!

19) Why do children get sick at 2:00 a.m. in the morning or on the weekends and not at 5:00 p.m. in the evening when you still have time to make it to the urgent care center?

20) Even the worst of days can get suddenly better with a smile, a kind word or a hug from someone you love.

That’s enough for now since I need to get ready for work. As Kayla said the other day, “It’s time to rock the roll!”

Have a great day everyone!

Nancy

12 Comments

Posted in Just stuff..., working mom

Tagged daughter, family, humor, kids, pets, place names, random thoughts, working mom

Of Craft Stores, Wal-Mart and Striking Back

Posted on October 12, 2011 | 10 comments

Good morning Everyone!

I love craft stores. All I have to do is enter one, and I fall into a trance even worse than the one that hits me every spring when I go by a garden center. (See, Spring, Roosters and Butterfly Farm.) One of the reasons it is worse is that I only enter the garden center trance once a year, at springtime, while the craft store trance is guaranteed to hit each and every time I walk through the door of a Michael’s, Hobby Lobby, Jo-Ann’s Crafts or Hancock Fabrics. (A.C. Moore’s used to be included in that list, but alas, the one in our area closed about two years ago.)

It is thanks to this quartet of stores, with an assist from a small store in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee that sells wood craft patterns (I can’t remember its name, but if you are familiar with that area, it is in the shopping center behind the Old Mill Restaurant on the right as you travel away from the main highway) and the local fabric shop in one of the cities in our area, the Opelika Sewing Center, that I have one of the finest craft closets for its size anywhere. In addition to a copious stash of supplies for counted cross-stitch, craft painting, sewing and scroll-sawing, (all of which I have done sometime in the last two years), along with various supplies for art class I have garnered, I have beginning supplies for a number of things I intend to try some day, including beading supplies, modeling clay and knitting supplies. I just can’t leave a craft store without buying something; there are days I manage to restrain myself to just a skein of cross-stitch thread or a bottle of craft paint, and other days when my buggy is full by the time I hit the check out counter.

Cross-Stitch Magnet I Made, 2011

Wal-Mart used to have a craft section where it sold cross-stitch supplies, craft painting supplies, yarn and knitting/crochet supplies and fabric. In fact, the cross-stitch supplies were one of my reasons for going to Wal-mart – it is a well-known corollary to Murphy’s law that no matter how many different DMC thread colors you have, you will always be short at least one color when you start a project. However, in the last two years all of those items have been phased out of all Wal-marts and I suspect I am not the only person who mourned their passing.

Craft Painting on Mini-pumpkins in 2005 - Mine is the one on the left; Kayla's are the three on the right

For those very select few who might live somewhere where a Wal-Mart does not, Wal-mart is a store that generally sells a little of everything. Originally, Wal-Marts were relatively small, and made a living by moving into a plethora of small towns. Over time, however, the Wal-Marts mutated into these giant stores called “Wal-Mart SuperCenters” which added full service grocery stores onto the other part of Wal-mart and in doing so created a store where you can pretty much buy anything from live fish (as pets) to asparagus to bed linens – but apparently not fabric or counted cross-stitch threads!

However, here where I live, we have one of the last original small Wal-marts in existence, and it took longer than most to ditch the craft supplies. Finally, though, even it was forced to bow to the pressure put on it by corporate, and it put the fabric and other craft stock away. In my small town, we are now left with one generic craft aisle that sells a few sewing notions, a few skeins of yarn (but no cross-stitch thread or supplies), a few craft painting items, and a huge array of Crayola products for children.

The 2007 ornaments I painted for people at work, Part I

That being said, you would not think I could manage to enter my craft trance at a Wal-mart anymore, but yesterday I managed to do so. You see, some enterprising buyer had the thought to put some “I learned to knit by myself” and “I learned to crochet by myself” kits immediately beside the yarn skeins. I went in to buy needle threaders (Singer has a three pack for just under $1) and before I knew it, I had added two skeins of yarn and the crochet pack to my buggy. It took an enormous effort of will, which wouldn’t have been possible in the old craft section because it was big enough to induce the trance for a much longer period of time, but I managed to argue myself into putting the crochet pack back. (The yarn had to stay because Kayla is working on her first needlework project – do you hear the tone of motherly pride in my voice? – and somehow the dark blue and black yarn that came with the kit had been lost.)

2007 painted ornaments, Part 2

So take that Wal-mart! You lost at least $8 in revenue yesterday because you decided to emasculate your craft section. Just imagine how much more you may have lost in the meantime!

Have a great day everyone!

Nancy

10 Comments

Posted in Just stuff..., working mom

Tagged counted cross-stitch, craft painting, crafts, daughter, family, Wal-mart, working mom, yarn

Mother’s Day, 2007

Posted on October 7, 2011 | 14 comments

Good morning Everyone!

Kayla came to live with us the year I turned 40. She was three. I noticed immediately that I was usually the oldest mother in any gathering, but I didn’t know that Kayla had noticed it too.

The year she turned five her day care held a Mother’s Day lunch, and of course I went. I arrived bright and early with my camera, to find the tables neatly decorated with tablecloths, flowers planted in styrofoam cups for decoration, and signs taped to each chair. The signs were drawn by each child, and were meant to mark their mother’s place. I found my place adorned with the following sign:

It said:

My Mom is 100 years old.

She has Brown hair and brown eyes.

My mom’s favorite color is all colors.

She likes to eat salad the best.

I make my mom happy when I hug her.

My mom always says I love you.

My mom is so smart she can read.

I love it when my mom and I hug.

I laughed until I cried over the age; it was even funnier when I overheard one mother, who was roaming the tables looking at the signs tell another mother “Oh, look, that mom’s child put her age at 80” and the other mom say, “Well, some poor woman’s child listed her age at 100!”

It won’t surprise anyone out there, I am sure, to learn that the sign is still in my closet, hidden away for posterity.

Have a great day everyone!

Nancy

14 Comments

Posted in Out of the mouths of babes...., working mom

Tagged age, daughter, family, humor, kid, mother, parenting, working mom

The Gourd Adventure Continues: A Craft Room and a View

Posted on October 5, 2011 | 12 comments

Good morning Everyone!

I might have overdone things just a tad on Tuesday, so I spent Wednesday happily engaged in mostly sedentary activities. I thought I’d share a little bit of what I did.

Gourd fronts

Some of you may remember a post in August I did called Out of Our Gourds for Gourds. In that post, for the first time, you met the newly formed, but not yet finished, pumpkin gourd on the left with both a front (above) view and a back (below) view.

Gourd Backs

Mom finished the Santa gourd in Jacksonville, but she had brought the other gourd back up here with her. She was going to finish it while she was here, but since she is making the Rapunzel costume for Kayla, which, by the way, is going to be gorgeous, she won’t have time. So yesterday, I took over the task of starting to finish the pumpkin gourd. I have some more detail work to do, but when I put my brushes up at 5:00 p.m yesterday, the pumpkin gourd was starting to shape up.

Pumpkin Gourd Front, Stage 2

Pumpkin gourd back, stage 2

Hopefully I will get a chance to show you the final version; there’s not too much left to be done besides some finishing on the leaves and some outlining.

The pumpkin gourd came up for discussion because I first had finished a Halloween sign to put in the front of the house, and all of my orange paints were out. I am pretty pleased with it, even if I do say so myself.

Halloween Sign, Close Up

It is supposed to be staked into the ground.

I’m probably going to put it somewhere near the corner of the house where the bird house gourd that my grandfather gave me recently is hanging proudly from the only one of three trees in our yard suitable for it.

Corner of house

For those readers who are part of the close-knit gourd community which someday I hope to meet, here is a close-up of the gourd. I don’t know where it was originally purchased.

After a solid afternoon of painting, I needed to stretch my legs and get out of the craft room formerly known as the great room in my house (don’t worry, Mark, we’ll have it back to normal soon – would Christmas Eve be too late?) so I walked a half block down the street to take pictures of my lake to share with you.

An afternoon moon was out. When Kayla was little, we would try to guess what Miss Moon had to say to Mr. Sun that was so important for her to arrive early to see him. They would have some interesting conversations.

Afternoon Moon

The lake is always pretty.

The Lake Right After A Speed Boat Went By

The trees with the lake are also beautiful.

We are starting to see as well the first harbingers of fall – and yes, fall arrives in Alabama, it is just a softer, slower process than the explosion up North. The changing of the leaves is not controlled by temperature, but rather by the length of the days – as the days get shorter, the leaves start to turn. Because the days get shorter faster up North, your trees turn much more quickly. Because our days get shorter more gradually, our trees gently fade into colors bit by bit, but once they all get turned, it is just as pretty.

First harbingers of fall

Not a bad way, overall, to spend a day recovering from surgery, is it?

Have a great day everyone!

Nancy

12 Comments

Posted in working mom

Tagged crafts, family, gourds, lake views, painting, photographs, photography, working mom

The Price is Right (?)

Posted on October 4, 2011 | 15 comments

Hi Everyone!

As you know if you follow this blog, I am at home right now recuperating from surgery. My Mom is here helping me. She also decided to make Kayla’s Halloween costume while she is here (she and Kayla have agreed on a Rapunzel costume.) When I came out of my room this morning from my morning nap, Mom had the TV on just for the background noise value while she was sewing. The Price is Right was on. I haven’t watched it for years – it is entertaining, plus I like Drew Carey, but I am astonished at the prices that they are listing for items on the show.

Brookstone Vienna Plus Cappuccino Espresso Maker, $580.00

For example, they had four contestants guess on the price of an espresso cappuccino machine. The low guess was $400, and the high guess was $700. The actual price? Over $1000!!!

Apparently, the Price is Right people don’t shop where I do. I just did a Google search for espresso cappuccino machines, and the highest priced one the computer pulled on the first round was around $130.00. After a little more searching, I found the one pictured above, which looks like a very nice one even to a non-espresso, non-capuccino aficionado, and it was $580.00. Now, I am sure the model on the show had many extra features than the one I just pulled, but still…

At Lowe's, Dacor professional 48 inch dual fuel range, priced at $10,799

They also had a steam shower and an oven range for one contestant, and they wanted the contestant to guess which one was worth $5470.00. The contestant picked the steam shower, which is what I would have picked also. However, my reasoning was that there was no way an oven range would cost that much (this did not look to me like one of the souped up commercial ranges).

Boy was I wrong! The oven range cost over $8000! So, again, knowing I have never in my life spent that much for an entire kitchen’s worth of appliances, (we bought our first oven for our first house $150.00 at an auction 19 years ago), let alone for one appliance, I took a second quick hop back to the internet to price oven ranges. To splurge, I went ahead and priced double oven ranges. The first results I came up with topped out at $1700, but investigating further I found that there are indeed professional ranges that even exceed $10,000, so perhaps the Price is Right people did come up with a bargain on that one.

Still, I think someone should suggest to them that they try shopping at Wal-mart, Target, Lowe’s or Home Depot like the rest of us. Or maybe I’m just cheap…..

Have a great day everyone!

Nancy

15 Comments

Posted in On the Home Front, working mom

Tagged espresso cappucino machine, family, humor, oven range, prices, shopping, the Price is Right, working mom

Surgery, Storms and Sleep (or the lack thereof!)

Posted on September 30, 2011 | 19 comments

Good morning everyone!

I had what I guess counts as major surgery on Tuesday and I have to admit, since I’d never had any surgery or general anesthesia before, I was a little scared.

I shouldn’t have been though. It wasn’t too very long after I was led back to pre-op that I was given a shot of something called “Versed” which basically put me to sleep until about 20 minutes before surgery. It really was amazing how quickly the entire pre-op room got quiet (there were maybe eight of us in curtained off little sections) as soon as each of us got our shots.

I woke up about 20 minutes before surgery, in time to remember being wheeled on the gurney from the pre-op room and telling the man who was wheeling me into surgery that I had never seen the world from that perspective before.

I also remember looking at the machine in the corner of the operating room that was going to help do the laparoscopic surgery robotically and telling two of the OR nurses that the machine looked like an octopus. If I had known whether they had seen Spiderman II, I could have been more precise and told them that it looked like the arms to Dr. Ock, but I wasn’t certain they would know. (My doctor told me later that I was right; the machine did look like an octopus!)

As one of the nurses was working to get my feet positioned correctly, the anesthetist told me she was going to give me a shot of pure oxygen for a few seconds, so I dutifully breathed in and out, and then she gave me another mask and said that whatever I was breathing next would make me sleepy. I remember breathing into the second mask for maybe a second. The next thing I remember is waking up in the recovery room, and asking the recovery room nurse if I was being polite.

She half laughed (I suspect if you are a nurse in a recovery room, you must sign some kind of non-disclosure agreement, since there’s no telling what comes out of the mouths of recovering patients), and asked if normally I wasn’t polite. I tried to explain to her that I was actually very polite normally, but I wanted to be sure I was still being polite since I wasn’t exactly my normal self. What came out was a croaked “important to be polite.” She agreed with me that it was.

After that, I decided to stop trying to make conversation for a while until the young man came in who was going to wheel me up to my room. (His name was Justin.) I was a little more awake then, I think, because I can remember chatting with him about how long had he been working at the hospital and did he like it and such until the gurney reached the surgery waiting room where my husband and mom joined me as we went up to the room. I chatted up a good number of other hospital employees while I was under the influence of whatever they had given me, but I did enjoy learning about them.

For example, Carolyn, who took my vital signs during the day, has a daughter who is getting her master’s in social work. Carolyn works three 12 hour shifts during the week and is off for the rest of the week which is important to her because she wants to take part in her church activities on Sunday. She worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and her third trip to my room at 7:15 was her last act before leaving for the day. My night nurse, Anna, has an 11 year old son, and knew all about the five second rule, which we discussed when I dropped one of my tablets onto the bed covers.

Mom left about 2 on Tuesday, soon after I was in the room, to go walk the dogs and pick up Kayla from school, take her to dinner and then bring her by for a minute. (I was in a hospital about 45 minutes from the house.) I think Kayla was both a little scared and a little relieved to be at the hospital. She had made me a get well card, which of course I saved, and had to know exactly what each and every tube coming out of me, or every sticker on me, was and she wanted to see my incisions.

The funniest one to explain was the catheter; Mark handled that with her outside the room, but then she came in and looked at me and said, “So you really have your own port-o-potty with you?” As usual, she had all of us laughing. I told her I wouldn’t have one for long, though, and thank goodness I didn’t!

While I was … uhhh.. shall we say under the influence of whatever I was under the influence of, my body really hadn’t noticed that anything was done to it. It wasn’t too long before I felt able to stand and walk a little bit (about 8 hours after surgery Mark, a nurse and I were strolling the halls for about two laps at 9:00 p.m.) and I was dressed and ready to leave for the house by 7 the next day.

However, I have noticed in my clients at work and in family members, a curious fact about surgery – the pain, for some reason, is at its worst on the third day after surgery. I am not sure whether or not Thursday, yesterday, was the third day or not.

The surgery was Tuesday, so is the third day Thursday, as in Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday, or is it Friday, as in I shouldn’t count Tuesday and then go Wednesday-Thursday-Friday? I’m pretty sure only I could make something so simple so complicated.

I do know that yesterday was the day on which my body suddenly realized that something had gone on inside it that it didn’t really appreciate. In revenge, it produced pain, which I controlled with medication, mostly Tylenol at least until night-time, and kept trying to get me take naps. (I have to admit, I didn’t fight the nap thing too hard, at least until I had the dream about adopting 9 children from a children’s home that was about to lose funding for those 9 spots!) My brain, in sympathy with the rest of my body, refused to cooperate on clear thinking, either. I had to keep searching for words that I couldn’t quite remember. For a writer, that is not fun!

Mark spent the night at the hospital with me, in a recliner, so he had the pleasure of being woken up about every hour and a half for something just like I was, but the nurses were very nice and just trying to do their job. Both he and I appreciated how attentive and kind all of the staff at the hospital was.

I think my Mom got the worst of the deal that evening, since she and a still semi-scared 9-year-0ld girl went home Tuesday night to three dogs who absolutely refused to believe that neither Mark nor I would be home that night. I don’t know what time they all got to sleep but Tyra apparently slept by the front door for a long time, convinced we would come in at any moment, and Darwin and Mandy were certain Mom was hiding Mark and I in our bedroom.

I do know when they woke up for the first time on Wednesday – at 4:20 a.m., when an unexpected thunderstorm came through. All 90 pounds of Darwin sailed onto Mom’s bed, waking her up, with another 55 pounds of Mandy approaching from the side, and Kayla coming out of her room, all of them announcing that the thunder had begun! Mom said it was the funniest thing to have Darwin’s huge Great Dane frame with his lab face staring anxiously down at her as she woke up.

Darwin, the look-out

Have a great day everyone!

Nancy

19 Comments

Posted in The quest for health, working mom

Tagged daughter, family, humor, kid, parenting, pets, surgery, working mom

Seven Things You Might Not Know

Posted on September 28, 2011 | 6 comments

Good morning everyone!

Today, we come to the last of the steps for me to finish accepting my Versatile Blogger awards, but first I need to tell you about a mistake I made. I received the Versatile Blogger Award three times in a week, not two. The third person who gave me the award was Mary Ann Kempher, a friend of mine from Twitter. I told you about her blog, Conversations with Mary Ann, in yesterday’s post. I just wanted to apologize publicly to her for omitting her name from Monday’s list of awarders.

I'm Sorry! (From Print Shop Professional 2.0)

It’s really hard to think of seven things you might find interesting about me that you don’t already know, since I already write about most of the things that I think might be interesting in my life, but I am going to give it my best shot.