Muttonings

Idiots

2010-06-13T00:53:00.002-04:00

When I moved this account over to WordPress two years ago, I meant it to be a permanent change. However, it seems that in order to leave comments on other people's Blogger accounts, I have to know my password for this account, and I have forgotten it.

Now, this happens a lot, and all sites have a "Forgot Password?" link. So does this one. However, there's a glitsch: The e-mail I used to set up my Blogger account is no longer valid. It's gone with the wind. This means that I now have to fill out a verification form that's longer than the application I submitted for the FBI skatey-eight years ago. And I've forgotten most of that information, too.

That, however, is not the problem. The problem is that it keeps telling me that I have to submit a valid e-mail address so they can contact me. HEL-LO-O, IDIOTS, THAT'S THE VERY FIRST THING I DID.

So if I'm not leaving remarks on people's blogs, it's not because I'm not reading them; it's because once again, the Technocrats have messed us over but good. Idiots.

Just a Reminder...

2008-04-21T21:18:00.002-04:00

I notice, via the good folks over at Bloglines, that I have seven subscribers on this blog, but only four over on WordPress. I'm now blogging over there -- see last post for the link -- or is my blog really that boring????? ;->

Moving!

2008-03-02T16:12:00.003-05:00

Well -- I did it. Lured by the number of people who have blogs on WordPress, as well as by the gawjus themes that it's possible to put up as wallpaper -- not to mention the ease of using it -- I've moved my blog here. Let me know how you like the new look!

Tagged!

2008-02-28T16:43:00.003-05:00

I'm not sure if it's the plethora of snow we've been getting -- three inches more last night, and at least six inches more on the way tomorrow night -- but I had completely missed out on the fact that I'd been tagged by my friend Elizabeth:

What if you had a $100 gift card to the music store of your choice, what would you buy??

I don't know. I honestly don't know. We have just about all the music we want, between us. That said, I could put at least some of it to good use on sheet music; I'd love to have The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, by Claude Debussy, and it would just be interesting to have the score of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto and/or Second Symphony on hand so I could follow along when listening.

Otherwise, I'm drawing a complete blank, at the moment. I think that finding out that yet more snow is on the way has just put a cap on my mental processes; I'm going to have some chocolate ice cream, and then have dinner, and then curl up with my cross stitch and Law & Order on the TV, and vegetate till spring. Jim's out of town till tomorrow, so at least I don't have to cook for him. And a good thing, too, in my current state.

So How Do You Actually Work This?

2008-02-28T07:47:00.003-05:00

I seem to be getting myself in deeper and deeper -- Suzanne was wondering how I keep track of all those different colors. This is an earlier photo that shows it best.

First, you grid. Some people actually have the patience to stitch a 10 x 10 grid onto their fabric. I don't; I work the first ten stitches in any given row, then use a washable dress-pattern marker to plot the grids. And as you can see from this photo, I only do the grid I'm working on, and leave little "tails" of marker at the end so that when I'm finished with that grid, I can lay out the next grid and know that it will be 10 x 10.

Having done that, I am also fanatical about marking off each row of ten stitches as I work it. I really would go crazy otherwise.

And the final thing I do to keep track of all the colors and threads -- and the reason I chose this photo -- is that I "park" stitches. I only work ten stitches at a time, straight down the row. Sometimes a row will contain as few as three colors, other times, every single stitch is a different color. When I work a stitch, I look ahead in that row to see where the color will occur next, and bring the needle up in that stitch. If it won't occur again in that row, I look ahead to the next row, and if I see that color symbol in the next row, I'll bring the needle up in that stitch and "park" the thread there until it's needed again. If it doesn't occur in the next row, I'll scan the entire grid to see where it shows up next.

Sometimes it doesn't occur again until much later in the project, and in that case, I do finish off the thread and wrap the leftover around the skein of floss, where it stays until I need it again. I finish off using something called a "pinhead stitch": Since cross-stitch fabric consists of little holes, you can bring the thread up in between two holes -- crosswise or lengthwise, according to the weave of the fabric -- and push the needle back down smack in the middle of the little square. Then you bring it back up on the other side of where you've made your "pinhead," and push it back down in the middle of the little square again. Then you pull it tightly. Once you get the hang of it, you can actually make the pinhead stitch nearly invisible, because it buries itself in the middle of the square.

To start threads, it depends on whether or not they're leftover from earlier working. If I have two strands left over from where they were worked before, I'll start with the pinhead stitch, too. If not, I cut an extra-long length, fold it in half, and push both ends through the eye of the needle; bring the thread up through the hole of the first stitch, but not all the way, and back down into the cross-point of the stitch (looks like / ). Then, as I'm bringing the thread back down, I guide it through the loop left hanging when I pulled the thread up, and then pull tight. It's called the "loop method" of starting. Some people frown on it because there is supposed to be a shiny side to thread and a dull side, and using the loop method means that you're working with both a shiny thread and a dull thread, so to speak. But I have never been able to distinguish which is which, so I just go on my merry way. Hey, it's my cross stitch. ;-)

How a Cross Stitch Resembles a Painting

2008-02-27T18:07:00.004-05:00

Suzanne was noting that she didn't know how shading could be accomplished with threads, so I thought I'd attach a photo of what one of these charts looks like.

The different colors of markers on this chart are an invention of mine so that I would know how much I got done on any given day. Purple is Sunday, Yellow is Monday, Orange is Tuesday, Blue is Wednesday, Red is Thursday, Green is Friday, Pink is Saturday.

It doesn't show very clearly, but each of those black blobs at the bottom -- the unmarked portion of the chart -- is a different symbol, and each symbol represents a floss color. The largest manufacturer of flosses, DMC, has a range of close to 4,000 colors; I've never seen a project with all 4,000 colors (egad), but the blend of all those colors is how you get that painterly effect.

I forgot to mention that this Saturday, my church is starting up a needlework group for the ladies of the parish -- women have been invited to bring their knitting or embroidery, and the idea is just to carve a space out of the month (first Saturday of each month) to get together and make time to work on projects, and hopefully, make some new friends in the parish. I bet I will be the only one to show up for a few months, though I might be surprised.

Updates, of one sort or another

2008-02-27T17:20:00.005-05:00

Someone was kind enough to ask about my progress on my latest cross-stitch project. So here it is. In terms of being the "latest" project, actually, it's one of the older ones -- I've been saying I started it in 2004, but I looked at all my progress photos and I actually started it in 2005 -- anyway, it's been around long enough, and it's Time to finish it, by Christmas, I hope. So this is my focus piece for the year. I have 40 more rows to go, and it will be 40% completed. I am learning so much about art composition from working this piece -- it intrigues me, for example, how the color rises at an angle, and how very many different colors go into just one 10 x 10 section. At any given time, I can have as many as 40 floss bobbins available to work with.

Last night, we got another six inches of the white stuff dumped on us -- and then we got rain on top of that. Have you ever tried to shovel six inches of wet snow?! This is what they call "widow-maker" snow, and all I can think is, I wish my doctors could see me slogging my way through this stuff -- I bet my heart is healthier than theirs, if I can handle this c**p. (Oh, dh is out of town again. I am so tempted to write his boss and say, "If you want him to travel in the middle of winter, then you, or whoever is ordering this travel, should come up here and shovel this stuff out of my driveway." Grrrr.)

And I had a sweet note from my priest -- I had sent him a clip from Fr. John Whiteford's blog about Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, and he responded, "What a wonderful town! We really should organize a trip there!" He has no idea just how wonderful Jordanville is. (If you click on the clip on Father John's blog, you do have to slog through about 4 minutes of trivia about Jordanville before you get to the "main event," the monastery.) Any time I see photos of the church, it's like looking at photos of an old and greatly beloved home.

Poor Father Costin, by the way, has come down with chicken pox. His older daughter brought it home from school, and about two weeks ago we were talking about it and he said, "Oh, yes, I have had chicken pox. I think I have had chicken pox." And right then, I knew he hadn't. Well, he's got it now. He still plans to be in church on Saturday for the First Saturday of Souls, but I told him not to come if he is feeling the least bit tired -- this isn't anything to play games with. Why do kids think they're indestructible!!!

Dumped. Again

2008-02-22T20:36:00.002-05:00

What a winter it's been, one snow storm after another since December. Normally, we don't get much snow in December at all -- we might have a dusting in time for Christmas -- this season, we had a good foot on the ground by Christmas, and it has continued unabated ever since. Today is just the latest storm, and it's particularly irksome, since dh is travelling in it.

Yes, the Powers That Be in Good Ol' DC decreed that Travel Must Go Forward, regardless of the probability of snow and travel delays, so this past week, dh has been in (of all places) Philadelphia. Our son lived in the Philly area for 2 1/2 years, and not once did my husband have travel in that area. Now that Chris has been home for a year, where does his father have to travel?! Go figure.

Having left the City of Brotherly Love at, what, 8:30 a.m.? -- he just walked in the door at 8:45 p.m. Sound miraculous? Not if you took the train, as dh did. He hates airline travel so much that he will actually wrestle with Defense Travel Service to get train travel approved -- as it turns out, it's a good thing he did, this time, since all the airports are closed and flights from elsewhere are delayed up the yinyang. But Amtrak made it through with, I think, only half an hour's delay. And if they had gotten stuck, at least he could have stretched out in his seat to sleep, not have had to make do with sleeping in a )@(#*$&%^! airport.

The worst part of the trip was getting from the train station to the house, because he had to wait for a cab for 45 minutes -- I do not drive, in this weather. But there's a cafe about two blocks from the train station, and he sat it out very happily, till the cabbie showed up and brought him home.

So all's well that ends well. But I am still ticked off. When dh was working for the Navy, they did not travel in the winter, period. Army, apparently, does not believe in such civility. Am I correct in my belief that Navy consistently wins the Army/Navy Football Game??

Meanwhile, there's a few inches of the white stuff out there -- six or so -- with more to come. Everyone I know is ready to hang the groundhog. Even me, and normally I love winter. I stopped loving it, this year, around mid-January. Come on, Mother Nature, February's almost over. We need at least a little warmth -- flowers, no, it's way too early for flowers, but a modification of air temperature, anyway.

And less -- much less -- of the white stuff, thankyouverymuch.

Please Tell Me...

2008-01-23T17:10:00.000-05:00

...it isn't already almost the end of January.

Sigh. I knew it was, really. I just can't believe that I haven't posted in almost a month.

It hasn't been all that bad a month, either, but Jim's been working from home, which really limits computer time. The up side of that is that I've gotten quite a bit done on my cross stitches (see above). I am particularly pleased with the detail on the Golden Tikhvin Theotokos, from Solaria Gallery -- I have included the link in case anyone else is interested in seeing the kinds of cross stitch this wonderful lady designs. The detail is simply incredible.

Some people have e-mailed me recently asking about my father-in-law. Let's just say that he is proving to me how much Christian development I really need; over December, I had a mini-meltdown, in that I got so overwhelmed that I was unable to process the need to pay bills, so got behind on several (not too radically, and we're all caught up now). The main reason for this, I think, is, as my husband put it, "Every time we open a piece of [his father's] mail, it creates a month's worth of work on his behalf."

And yesterday was no exception, as I went to the nursing home to pay his monthly bill there -- a five-minute errand -- and ended up hanging around to get a list of his prescriptions because, guess what, we never even thought to enroll him in Medicare Part D!!! And the nursing home is no longer direct-billing his medications, so we will now have to pay that bill. He has the money -- I'm not worried about that -- it's just one more d*** thing I have to do on his behalf, while he sits there, consuming food and oxygen, and raising his fist to his son when we go to visit. (I nearly kicked him when he did that last Sunday.) He isn't senile, either, and he isn't mean-tempered with the staff -- just with his only child.

Pray for me, because I'll never get into heaven on the strength of my charitable thoughts for my husband's "father."

And I am back taking Russian. Why? Because I hate myself??? I don't know. But I really love the two department heads, even if they are atheists. ;-) And it is my last grammar class -- after this, I'll have to take literature classes or something to stay current with what I've learned.

So -- life continues. More or less. Now I have to file all the paperwork from an afternoon of paying bills. And I'm going to post this blog before I get started on another rant. =:0

Not Quite So Humbug ;-)

2007-12-31T22:58:00.001-05:00

I couldn't stand the thought of the old year passing without a bit of reflection.

After the horrors of 2006, that year closed on a hopeful note, and this year began with confirmation of that hope: Our son's move back to his home state. We've seen him off and on throughout the year, but of course a good bit more of him since he's about 700 miles closer to home. His visits fell off during the summer, when he was working six days a week, but he was in for a week just before Christmas; he spent Christmas with us; and surprise, surprise, there's a possibility that he may spend tonight and tomorrow with us, as well. He called to say he was going to a party, but wasn't expecting it to last "more than a few hours" (presumably, it breaks up at midnight, then he still has an hour's drive to our place). I hope he makes it to our house, though, because tomorrow, we're supposed to get a foot of snow (a little under a meter, for European or Canadian readers).

The snow began, I believe, around December 10, and so far, we've had -- now, is it three or four storms of significant size? I don't remember a winter like this since I was a girl, sixteen years old and slogging three miles on foot to school because, well, it was a school day and in our house, you didn't stay home from school unless there was a death in the family (your own). Anyway, none of the buses were running, so I walked to school, and yes there were drifts of snow to overcome, got there around 9:45 (having left the house at 7:00), rang the doorbell with trepidation -- to discover from an astonished nun that school had been cancelled for the day, and I had to walk all the way back home. I think I made it around 1:00 or so. My mother demanded to know what I was doing home, and all I said was, "School was cancelled," and that was that.

Then there were the snows of 1967 and 1968. People who fume at Callous Business are probably unaware that even the evil minions of Wall Street and Madison Avenue actually sent employees home if a storm was threatening. One year we were dismissed at 1:00 p.m., and I made it home on the elevated train from lower Manhattan to my home in Queens; but again, no buses were running, and I had to walk the mile from the train station to my house. It was windy that day, and the very hardest part of that walk was the last two blocks, long blocks that probably came to a third of a mile and were all uphill. I remember standing next to a parked car and thinking, "I'm not going to make this," then pulling myself together and battling that fierce wind down the last block to home, then collapsing in tears on the back steps.

At least this snow hasn't been accompanied by such horrendous wind, nor have I been required to be out in it, other than to help shovel the driveway. But we've had an awful lot of snow, and dh and I aren't as young as we were 21 years ago, when we bought the place. Today, dh was even talking about moving to a retirement community, something both of us have resisted with all our might. It's like God's waiting room, for crying out loud.

So we've been quite busy, what with snow removal and enjoying our son and our washing machine breaking down and being unrepairable because That Part Is No Longer Manufactured, and having to spend money earmarked for Christmas presents on a new washer, instead. Thankfully, we had all of ds's presents bought already, so we just did without presents ourselves. At our age, who needs a lot, anyway. But a new washing machine is crucial. ;-)

On both Christmas Eve and this past Sunday, I got to direct our choir again. The choir director was visiting family in Florida, as we'd known, and had made arrangements with a teenaged boy to direct in her absence, as we'd known; as we hadn't known, the teenaged boy got cold feet and never showed up at all for Christmas Eve, and yesterday, I was in full swing when he did show up, saw me at the podium, and shook his head vehemently when I stood aside to let him take my place. I must admit that I enjoyed doing it again, but it would have been nice to have a little more advance notice.

And there is the ongoing and phenomenal blessing of our new priest. The newness is beginning to wear off, both for him and for the parish, but he is still unflaggingly enthusiastic, and I have yet to hear a negative word about him -- in our parish, that's something of a record for any priest. It seems he and his family are ski fanatics, having gone skiing in Vermont over the long Thanksgiving weekend and in New Hampshire for a week after Christmas; and in speaking with him today, I learned that he's planning to make another ski trip to the same New Hampshire mountain "just for one day, on Wednesday" (his usual day off). He and his family continue to live in Massachusetts, where they'd bought a house just last year; I should mention to him that if he bought a house up here, he'd pay less money all around, because not only is it cheaper to live up here than in Massachusetts, but he'd also get to save on resort fees, since he wouldn't have to stay overnight. On the other hand, maybe that's the charm.

Oh, yes, he's spiritually a great blessing, too. ;-) People were telling me yesterday about his not being too happy with the Christmas Pageant this year, because Baby Jesus was represented by a little girl baby: "Jesus was a boy Baby!" he kept insisting, but finally gave in reluctantly. They thought that was very funny. I think it just shows that he is being true to his priestly responsibility to keep to the true Tradition. (But yeah, I find the story amusing, too, and very sweet in his earnestness.)

Now, if only his Romanian accent didn't keep reminding me of Count Dracula...

Bah. Humbug. :-(

2007-12-06T16:37:00.000-05:00

Permit me a bit of grumbling here. Just -- be here for me, OK?

I'm upset. A friend of mine knows someone who has apparently fallen on hard times, and is asking people to buy a holiday product from this person. So far so good. It's just -- I have the sense of a whole lot that has gone unsaid.

I mean, the situation that this person finds himself in, is not something that strikes out of the blue. Let's just say that it involves a legal action, one that is so difficult to execute that there has to be a phenomenal amount of evidence, accumulated over a long period of time, for that action to be executed. (An example: Someone locally was recently evicted from a property that was not only a neighborhood eyesore, but also a health hazard, not only to the resident but to neighborhood schoolchildren (the property was across the street from an elementary school). The length of time involved in the eviction? Seven years.)

The situation that my friend's friend finds himself in is similar. It sounds as if the person's financial straits are dire. But -- dire doesn't just hit, it builds over a period of months. In that time, wasn't it possible for this person to contact family members for help? I'm thinking of the many relatives who stayed with my late Aunt Mary over a period of about fifteen years. Nothing was said, none of us young folk knew that these people were homeless and would have been out on the street but for my aunt's generosity. They stayed for an average of three years with her, finding work, then finding homes of their own; in a couple of cases, we never heard from these people after they moved on. But my point is, they called on family for help, and that help was forthcoming.

So, why is this person soliciting help on the internet?! Does he not have family to whom he could turn? Is he so on the outs with family that they wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot pole? Why are you bothering complete strangers for help?

As I said, I have the sense of a whole lot that has gone unsaid. And without those blanks being filled in -- I feel used.

Thank you for the shoulder to cry on. We now return you to your regularly scheduled revelries.

Making Your Home a Haven, Day 3

2007-12-05T10:01:00.001-05:00

Today's Challenge:

1) Refresh Your Spirit (5 minutes)

I actually got to sing Vespers last night, and Matins this morning. I hate when I sleep late, and have to miss my prayer rule -- the day never goes as well as when I get up a bit earlier and get this done.

The blog I cribbed this idea from (Crystal Paine's blog -- see down a couple of posts) was encouraging participants to list three things we're thankful for. In my case:

1. Being Orthodox
2. Having a good roof over my head. It's small, but we raised two kids in it, and it still does us well.
3. Having an absolutely sterling husband, who loves me and puts up with a mind-numbing job to provide said roof over our heads.

2) Take Time to Plan (5 minutes)

Ahem. I can either pray, or plan. ;-) That said, at least I have dinner planned: Spaghetti with shrimp sauce. This is cheating, though, since this is our usual Wednesday dinner.

However, I'll take the challenge and share my to-do list, such as it is:

1. Bredenbeck's Bakery in Philadelphia sent my son's Christmas cookies to our house. Every year since they were born, we've celebrated St. Nicholas Day with the kids by putting cookies in their shoes; the year Chris moved out to PA, I was wondering how to continue this tradition when I came across Bredenbeck's online, and they actually ship real German cookies. So Chris has not missed his cookies at all, until this year -- and he won't this year, either, if I have anything to say about it. I'll ship 'em overnight express. So that's my first item.

2. The "Maintenance Required" light has come on in my car, and won't shut off. I suspect it's because when I had the oil changed last week, the people who changed it forgot to turn off the blinking "Maintenance Required" light, and now it's on permanently; but I do have to check with the dealership about this.

3. I need to pay some bills. :-(

4. And I need to study for a Russian exam that takes place tomorrow. We don't have finals in these classes; we get one test that covers each chapter, and then go on to the next one. So this test will finish out Chapter 11. I'm not sure if there will be time to cover Chapter 12 completely before all our classes wind up, though.

3) Do Something! (15 minutes or so)

Quoting from Crystal's blog now:

Today we're going to focus on the laundry and laundry room. Your goal by the end of today is to have all of your laundry finished, folded, and put away.

Uh-huh. In my dreams, maybe. What I can do in this area is wash a load of towels and hang them out on the drying rack so that the house gets some moisture into the atmosphere. But folded and put away?? That waits for tomorrow, when the stuff is dry (and I get to hang out a new load of laundry!).

One More T'ing...

2007-12-04T18:32:00.000-05:00

...as Columbo used to say.

This past Sunday, our Hierarch, Metropolitan Methodios, came to visit our parish. (Which is its own story: He called our priest on Monday and said, "Oh, by the way, I have an opening in my calendar for this Sunday, and I'd like to come visit." Gulp.) Anyway, he came, he saw, whether or not he conquered the choir is still up for grabs ;-) -- but the point is, he preached the most wonderful sermon. I've never heard a sermon like this.

For one thing, he cited the text of this past Sunday's Gospel, the story of the blind man by the side of the road who asks Jesus for his sight. The Metropolitan said that the Church gives us this Gospel at this time of year because we are all in darkness, stumbling around like the blind man, and we should remember that the Light of Christ is coming to us.

But the other thing he said that really grabbed my attention was that the blind man cried out, and Christ -- God -- stopped walking and paid attention to him. And the Metropolitan said, When we pray, we stop God in His tracks, and He listens to us.

Think about that.

When we pray, we stop God in His tracks. And He listens to us.

Holy cow.

Making Your Home a Haven 2

2007-12-04T17:31:00.000-05:00

Since I was out of the house at 9:30 today and didn't get home till 4:30, there wasn't too much I was able to do on this front. Today's effort was getting the breakfast dishes done before I left the house, and making the beds. This is more of a triumph than ordinary tidy housewives might think: There have been days when the dishes didn't get washed till half an hour before dh came through the door, and as for making beds...well...

I love the sight of a made-up bed, so I never thought twice about it until dh asked me not to make up his bed -- "It's easier to get into when it's left unmade."

This is the same person who comes from the family that never put anything away in the kitchen because, "We'll just have to get it out again." And I seriously wonder why my house always looks like a bomb hit it?!

So the bed stayed unmade, for a few years, actually. Once a week I'd change the sheets, but that was it.

Then we had the house blessed. Our new priest decided that a good way for him to meet the parish would be to bless everyone's houses over the summer, and since ours hadn't been done at Theophany (the weather was crappy), I invited him over to do that. And to have the house blessed -- you have to have tidy rooms.

And dh discovered that, wonder of wonders, it's kind of nice to sleep in a made-up bed.

So that is my contribution to making this home a haven for today. Actually, pretty much every day, since the house got blessed, but since I was out of the house all day, I decided this would have to count for half a brownie point. :-)

(The chief reason I was out for so long is that I went to confession. My spiritual father's parish is 40 miles away. 40 miles over roads that are not entirely clear of ice and snow is, um, interesting. But I really needed to go to confession. Now to put the results into practice -- I need to go sing Vespers.)

Making Your Home a Haven

2007-12-03T17:35:00.001-05:00

OK, I have to confess that I don't know how many of my readers this will actually apply to, but the idea, which I got from Emma's blog, seems to be to come up with one or more things you can do every day to make your home a haven for yourself and your family, then post about it on your blog. The woman who first came up with the idea (Crystal Paine) cleaned her front entryway, made herself a cup of tea, and spent time with her Bible. Me...

Well....

I made a nice beef stew for my husband.

Hey, it's been snowing all day, and he's been alternately digging out the driveway and tele-working. So I just tossed some beef, carrots, potatoes, and tomatoes in the crockpot and let 'er rip. I must admit that the smell is driving me crazy! But I will be content with my crab cakes and rice.

I also worked on my cross stitch, which was very soothing and meditative, and made up (I hope) for all the ranting and raving I did when dh informed me that his father wants to come back to living with us. NO. Plain and simple. I finally told dh, "It's him or me," knowing that dh would know I was at least half joking (and half not!!!). There is simply no way we could maneuver a 95-year-old man, with his fragile bones, down a flight of steps to get to and from his various doctors' appointments. To say nothing of the fact that he won't tell us if something is bothering him -- he won't tell the people at the nursing home, either, but they know what to look for, and we don't -- and oh, yeah, I can just see me maneuvering him into and out of the shower. He certainly can't do it on his own.

So maybe my chief contribution to Making My Home a Haven was putting my foot down about Dear Old Dad. ;-)

Our Four (More or Less) Hours of Fame

2007-11-30T17:38:00.000-05:00

Not sure if this is appearing on national news, and I guess I won't find out for another hour or so, but if you have seen http://www.wmur.com/news/14737868/detail.html?treets=man&tml=man_break&ts=T&tmi=man_break_1_12260411302007 -- yes, Rochester, NH, is where we live. I found out about this when attempting to run a couple of errands downtown -- pick up a finished cross stitch, and drop some sheets off at a local laundromat (we don't have a dryer, and it's below freezing outside).

All the local stations have been running this story, and the inaccuracies I've heard -- our fanciest restaurant described as a "bar," a 72-hour drinking bout on the part of the hostage-taker described as a 48-hour drinking bout, his "being Known to police" (as in, "Oh, yeah, this guy has a major criminal record") being the result of having grown up with half the cops on the force -- well, it's been an Education, in terms of just how accurate the media is. But you already knew that, right? ;-) I mean, look what they do to Orthodoxy....

I should add that no one seems to know quite why he picked on Hillary's campaign headquarters, but it seems perfectly clear to me that surely, he is of the opinion that the fewer Hillary supporters there are in the world, the better. Not that I would advocate this particular method of reducing their numbers, but I have been truly astonished by the number of brainless idiots -- I mean, Hillary supporters there are in these here parts. My secret hope is that this will convince the Democratic Party that this woman is way too controversial to be electable, and they will hand the nomination to someone with at least marginal brains. (Naming no names here...) But I'm not too convinced that that will actually occur.

Meanwhile, I sure hope I can get my sheets taken care of tomorrow. Sigh.

Commitment to Loveliness. Or Something Like It, Anyway.

2007-11-26T19:16:00.000-05:00

First, thanks to all who commented on my last blog posting, for affirming what I believe to be the correct course of action. Philippa, you are right, I shouldn't read her blog, but at this stage, it's the only way I have of keeping up to date with my grandsons. :-(

Now, on to better stuff. I recently became acquainted with a blog called Charming the Birds from the Trees. The nicest thing about it is that it's another Orthodox lady -- can't know too many of those, there are so few of us! This young lady seems to be committed to a standard of gracious living that I thought was lost forever; good for her! Once a week, she posts a "Commitment to Loveliness," which she describes as:

a fun way to increase femininity and beauty in our lives each week without even trying! All you have to do is choose five things that you would like to work on or do during the week that will increase the loveliness in your life!

I'm all for that! We can't have enough beauty in life! So here are my five:

1. Listen to more good music. We've gotten into a rut lately of watching television, and although we don't watch too many of the network offerings, we do have a rather large library of tapes and DVDs. Time to put them on hold, for this week, at least.

2. Make a point of tidying up the house. With all that goes on around here, it's too easy to give the featherbeds a fluff and say, "I'll make the bed properly later." Or to stash the plethora of catalogues out of sight and say, "I'll get to that later." Not this week.

3. Make an appointment to get my hair and nails done. I started having my nails done a few months back, after literally years of neglect, and ya know? It feels pretty darn good to look civilized.

4. Sing Matins and Vespers regularly. With Jim home so much lately, it's been too easy just to read the prayers, or not to say them at all. But this time of year has some of the loveliest music in all Orthodoxy.

5. See if I can actually go a week without using slang. This will be a tough one. New Yorkers speak better slang than they do English.

Once you have chosen five simple things, post them on your blog and link to this post in your post, and then post the direct link to your Commitment to Loveliness post in the comments section. This looks like it could be fun!

Dilemma

2007-11-24T13:57:00.000-05:00

Some time ago, when I mentioned on the OrthWomen's list that I had a daughter, someone responded that she hadn't known I had a daughter. This post may explain why I don't generally talk about her.

This isn't the first time she's trashed her father and me on this blog (which she knows I read), and there was a period of about three years when she didn't want anything at all to do with us. During that period, she initially had my whole family convinced that the problem was me, and the way I was treating her, but over that period of time, people who got to see us together formed a totally different picture, and sadly, my daughter has no credibility in my family anymore. Obviously, with her friends, it's a different story.

My husband is in favor of telling her off, loudly and clearly, and breaking off relations altogether. I just don't know. Part of me wants to say, "OK, enough with the lies." But a larger part of me references the example of St. Nektarios, who lived under the cloud of slander for, what, 30? 40? years of his life? and died under it. Only after his death was he revealed as a saint, and only after his death was the slander exposed for what it was.

What's better -- to endure, and keep praying for her, hoping that she corrects herself? Or to call her on it?

No Chris :-(

2007-11-23T17:42:00.000-05:00

Well, at least he made it home for Thanksgiving dinner, but had to return to work today. We had him a scant 24 hours.

But this time last year, he was home for five days, and then we had to put him on a train and ship him back to Philly for another month. It was so hard to see him get on the train, knowing he was going back to a half-life that he absolutely detested. We didn't even know that the job he has now was in the offing.

So at least he's able to be with us somewhat more often this year, which was my big Thanksgiving focus. Face it -- we got spoiled, being able to see him every weekend when he was working days. He's been on nights since September, and expects to continue on nights till January. After that, who knows?

The biggest downside to nights, besides lousing up his circadian rhythm, is that he can't get to church because he doesn't get in till sometime after midnight -- he works from 4:00 p.m. until anywhere between midnight and 4:00 a.m. -- then just crashes till about 10:00 or so. And the nearest church is 25 miles away. I hope he doesn't lose track altogether of his spiritual life; he's been such an inspiration to so many people in his faithful church attendance.

Just grumping aloud. I miss my son. I have to remind myself -- I missed him a whole lot more last year. ;-)

Up to No Good...

2007-11-18T16:28:00.000-05:00

...as usual. Yes, I've been Very, Very Quiet of late, and this picture is why.

Now, there's a story here. (Otherwise, why blog about it?) I bought this back in either 1989 or 1990 so I'd have some needlework to occupy myself with in the summer months -- in those days, I was BIG into knitting, and face it, wool just isn't what you want in your hands when it's 90 degrees in the shade with 100% humidity. So, traipsing around the Windsor Button Shop, a wonderful store which has sadly gone out of business -- they couldn't afford the rent at the local mall -- I spotted this and picked it up. Hey, it has sheep, right? What knitter doesn't have a love affair with sheep, if only in theory? So I bought it and started work on it right away.

By 1990 or 1991 -- I rather think I started it in 1989, so progress would have been by 1990 -- I had the words all in, and the line border. Then I set it aside -- time to get back to knitting -- and forgot all about it. In 2001, feeling horribly depressed over a number of things including Empty-Nest Syndrome, I rediscovered cross stitch, picked this back up, and filled in all the sheep and the background. Then I was stumped -- I knew that the floral border would require a good deal of finicky work -- so I set it aside again.

In the meantime, I discovered the wonderful world of internet groups, including a couple of cross-stitch groups, and these taught me hitherto-unknown techniques like the pinhead stitch for starting and ending needlework, the loop method of starting, and "parking" threads so that it's possible to work on really complicated projects with multiple colors of thread without losing one's mind. In October of this year, I had to attend a conference for tax collectors -- what needleworker in her right mind travels without a project?! (On the other hand, who said I was in my right mind....) This was my designated Travel Project (shows how much travel I do), so I flung it into the van and headed up for three incredibly boring days, about which I have already blogged.

But they were just the jump-start I needed to keep going on this project, and this past week, it suddenly dawned on me:

After, what, 18? 19? years -- I could finish this thing.

I got it done last night.

Now to frame it, and then -- on to the next thing, or rather, back to current projects, namely, the Golden Tikhvin Theotokos (see my last post for photo), which is my Lenten project, and a bit more work, as I can fit it in, on Maryland Mountain Express, which is somewhere in the distant archives of this blog. (I just looked -- January 2006)

All I can say is, thank heaven for "parking."

Gold October

2007-11-07T10:27:00.000-05:00

On Saturday evening, dh and I watched "The Hunt for Red October" on AMC -- we have it on video, but this was a letterbox version with captions underneath that made little esoteric notes about the movie.

I can't help wondering if this was a complete accident, or if somebody over at AMC was aware that November 7 was coming up, the anniversary of the 1917 revolution (which took place on October 25, according to the Old Calendar, thus the references to "October" when discussing this particular event).

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, November 7 has been a source of considerable tension in Russia. On that day, the dwindling Communist faithful gather to remember their lost glory -- it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that they are enjoying a right they certainly denied to their own opposition! -- and grumble and mutter about how the world is going to the dogs, or something like that.

Anyway, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has replaced November 7 with November 4, the "Day of Russian Unity." The Day of Russian Unity commemorates the day the Russians drove the Poles out of Moscow in 1612, during the Time of Troubles in between Tsar Ivan IV ("the Terrible") and the rise of the Romanov dynasty. My friend Dimitra has blogged about this new holiday, and notes that it is also the feast of the Kazan icon of the Mother of God -- which played a significant role in the driving out of the Poles.

So I shall think of this new holiday as "Gold October," since I almost never think of the Theotokos without thinking of that line from Psalm -- 44, I think it is -- "At Thy right hand stood the Queen, arrayed in a vesture of inwoven gold." The icon above, of the "Golden Tikhvin Theotokos," is what's in my mind.

Dimitra, I should note, is currently living in Russia and teaching English. Can you imagine actually being able to live in an Orthodox country?!?!?!

Oh-My-Goodness

2007-10-31T08:04:00.000-04:00

DH is in Boston today for a two-day conference, which means I get more computer access than usual. :D

Got online this morning, ostensibly to write to himself, and the first thing I did, as I always do, was check out my Bloglines subscription. I would never remember to read any blogs if it weren't for Bloglines. Anyway, the very first in my list is daughter Christa's blog (see right-hand column). This morning, she had a photo of "Hamlet," her older son, in his dragon costume -- absolutely adorable -- and a link to a story, which I clicked on for the heck of it, not realizing at first that she was the author.

If you ignore the Language at the beginning, this is incredible...

Of course I know that she is a professional writer, but this is Shirley Jackson stuff. WOW!

Livin' La Vida Loca

2007-10-20T11:33:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure what Ricky Martin's definition of la vida loca is, but mine is probably pretty tame by comparison. Still, for me, it was definitely a Walk on the Wild Side -- to wit, a tax collectors' convention in North Conway, NH.

There were lots of workshops that were about half useful and half boring. The worst was the legal presentation on bankruptcy, by a lawyer who droned on and on and on -- at the end of an hour and a half, he was at the end of Page 2 of a 15-page presentation -- I left at that point, and was followed by so many women that I thought a break had been granted (when my own boss came up about 15 minutes later, I learned that there had been no break, they all just decided to follow my "sterling" example!). The second-worst was the one on employee relations, since it focused a great deal on how to discipline unsatisfactory employees, and most of us don't have employees, since we work for small towns and not big cities. Reality check here, folks.

So what was so wild about all this? The food.

I'm serious. The convention was held at a resort in North Conway, and while the accommodations were frankly crummy, the food was unreal. The sandwiches we had for lunch were made from slabs of meat. The dinners were lavish, even if you were "consigned" to eating salmon because it was Wednesday and that was the most "fast food" on the menu. (The filet mignon at the Thursday gala dinner was to die for. Probably literally.)

But the desserts were sinful. Put it this way: The desserts were served buffet style, and you could not only choose your own, but build your own. So if you wanted, for example, strawberry shortcake, you could start with half a biscuit, or two biscuits. You could have half a cup of strawberries, or half a bowl. We won't even go into the subject of whipped cream. There were cheesecake, chocolate "molten" cake (melted in the mouth), tiramisu, bread pudding, cobblers, and the aforementioned strawberry shortcake. All at once. And those are just the desserts I can remember.

Whatever wasn't finished, was simply thrown away. We probably had enough food, over the course of three days, to feed half of Africa for at least a week. I was, frankly, shocked at the volume of food available to maybe 100-150 people who were far from malnourished -- though I should note that we probably worked it off just by getting around this vast resort, which has one elevator that serves three floors of sixty rooms each. And to get to the elevator, you had to walk a quarter of a mile (I clocked it) if your room was at the far end of the corridor. We all did a lot of walking and stair-climbing.

Then there was the drinking. The less said about that, the better.

All of this was paid for by the municipalities that employ us. I don't know what the fees were (registration, room and board, whatever else). I don't want to know. I do know that unless I see a topic that I genuinely need to know something about -- I won't be going again.

Кровь Христой

2007-10-13T11:18:00.000-04:00

Or, the Blood of Christ.

Priests must learn in seminary how to channel excess energy. Mine has decided that, since I offered to embroider Church paraments (analogion covers, Communion cloths, etc.), I must be a good person (a) to sew extra Communion cloths, and (b) to wash them. Why do people think that if you like embroidery, you must like sewing? I hate sewing. My mother used to give me all her mending and hemming to do, too, since she hated mending, and, well, since I loved embroidery, I must like sewing, too. Sigh.

So this past week, Father gave me a box of Communion cloths that need washing, and a sack of towels and a sheet that had been used in a Baptism. The sheet and towels, he explained, could go into the washing machine after the Chrism had been rinsed off them, but the Communion cloths would have to be washed by hand.

So I bought a large storage bin (for the sheet and towels), and on the first dry day all week -- today -- I carted the bin outside and poured three buckets of hot water into it, along with some environmental detergent -- since the water has to be dumped out into the ground, and in a place where no one will walk at that, I figured I'd better use environmental detergent. I left that to soak out on the "back" porch, and filled a much smaller basin with hot water, more environmental detergent, and the Communion cloths.

Let me tell you, six gallons of water weigh a lot. I couldn't lift that tub of water after I'd wrung out and removed the sheet and towels. I ended up emptying it the same way I'd filled it, pail by pail, and when the pail would no longer pick up much water, I was able to lift the bin and carry it out to a spot in the back yard that is so overgrown, no one will ever be able to walk on it. It has the added advantage of being a property line shared by a Catholic church. Look out, Catholics. ;->

Then I turned my attention to the Communion cloths, and I quickly discovered something: When you wash Communion cloths, the water turns...

...the color of blood.

The same color it would turn if you rinsed out clothes that had gotten blood on them.

Suddenly it hit me, as it never has before: That is the Blood of Christ that seeps into those cloths, and I was washing it out. What do you do with that knowledge?! The only thing possible, for me anyway, was to whisper the Jesus Prayer over and over, all the while tears pouring down my face. I heartily recommend this experience to anyone who has begun to get comfortable with his faith. It's a real smack upside the head.

(This water also has to go into the ground, where no one will walk on it. That patch of garden is awfully soggy, at the moment, between three straight days of rain and a lot of wash and rinse water.)

Now, my "back" porch is actually on the side of the house, and my house is on a very main street in town. I couldn't help wondering what the neighbors were making of this performance, the tub of water with the laundry ("Doesn't the poor soul have a machine?! What's wrong with the laundromat?!") followed by the trips back and forth into the house with large pails of water, not to mention the repeated trips out to the "back 40." My family and I can provide weeks of entertainment to the entire neighborhood just by having a dead tree removed and replaced by two new trees. I cringe to think what they'll be saying now.

But it was worth it.

My only problem: How am I going to do this kind of thing during the winter, here in the Far Frozen North?!

Maybe the One Whose Blood I was washing, will provide the answer to that one, too.

Wash Day

2007-09-24T19:47:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth has left a post about hanging out her laundry with which I whole-heartedly concur. I left a comment there, but I'll post it here, too, in case there are other Crunchy Cons out there who think the sight and smell of hanging out the laundry to dry is worth the slight extra effort and time.

First, there's nothing like the smell of line-dried laundry. No fabric softener on earth can duplicate it. Then, there's a softness to all but the towels that also cannot be duplicated by any fabric softener. (And towels soften up amazingly if, as you take them off the line, you give them a couple of sharp slaps against your legs before folding them. Fluffs them out.) And the sight of clothes dancing on a clothesline in a freshening breeze practically screams HOME! You can almost smell the apple pie cooling in the kitchen. (For the record, I have never baked an apple pie in my life.)

OK, I can practically hear Mimi jumping up and down, shouting, "But what about RAIN?" (Mimi lives in the Pacific Northwest.) This was my chief comment to Elizabeth's post. I told her to consider the addition of a "utility porch" somewhere on her house. I had one in the back of a house we rented in Massachusetts for two years. It was just heavenly. It was just a back porch with clotheslines strung across the ceiling from side to side -- five of 'em, wrapped around hooks that had been screwed into the side supporting beams of the porch roof. Every morning, before leaving for work (I was working at the time), I would wash a load of laundry and hang it out to dry. And in the evening, I'd bring it in off the line, all fresh and soft. One year, it rained for an entire week in the spring, and I washed clothes every day. And every day, I'd bring them in, all fresh and soft -- and dry.

My current house does not have a utility porch, and we've lived in it for 21 years. I keep toying with the idea. But there's an awkward bulkhead (door to the cellar) that juts out from the middle of the back of the house, and I cannot design any way around it, short of a trap door -- and I really don't want to go there.

So, in the winter, I dry my "smalls" on racks in the kitchen, which moisturizes the air beautifully. And I take my sheets and towels to the laundromat and suffer with machine-dried laundry. Hanging out laundry in the fresh air is one of the few things I actually like about summer.

An aside here: Portsmouth Naval Ship Yard is not too far from our house. Submarines routinely come in for repair, and the crew are billeted with local families while the ship undergoes repair. One of my friends once hosted a young sailor from California for about six months. They all got along very well, and on his last night before reporting for sea duty, they took him out to a local lobster pound for dinner. As they sat around enjoying Maine "lobstah," the young fellow thanked them profusely for their hospitality, then added: "There's just one thing I've never understood. What is the significance of this local custom of hanging out clothes in the back yard?"

!!!!!!!!!

My Blog is Worth...

2007-09-22T09:31:00.000-04:00

My blog is worth $3,387.24.
How much is your blog worth?

Cribbed from s-p, whose blog, according to these yahoos, is worth nothing. I suspect that their monetary value is based on how often one blogs -- s-p, having a real life (unlike yours truly), rarely blogs.

In other news, the visit with Father Costin went very well. We got the place tidied up sufficiently to look like civilized folk; he went from room to room, blessing the house (I didn't open the door to the porch, which is still full of boxes that we are gradually throwing out, and I didn't let him down into the basement -- he just "threw some holy water down there," as Jim requested), and then we all sat down to lunch. As he was blessing the food, I happened to glance over towards the corner, where I have a small sideboard, and spotted...

...six cans of Campbell's Soup that Jim had put there and forgotten to put away.

So much for gracious living. ;-)

Update to this post: I forgot to note that Father also blessed the outside of the house, something no priest had ever done before (probably because at the time of the usual house blessing, there's about a foot of snow in the backyard). I wash a load of clothes every day, and on Thursday, I wash my "whites"; and since we don't have a dryer, being Crunchy Cons, my laundry hangs in the back yard. So there's Father, traipsing all around the house, including the back yard, and there's my laundry, keeping time to "When Thou wast baptized in the Jordan, O Lord." At least the underwear was decorously hidden behind the T-shirts.

We had a nice visit, and the food was good. And he left his Trebnik book here, so I guess that subconsciously, he wanted to come back. (But I brought it over to church the next day.)

I can't help wondering what the nuns next door made of this guy in a black robe sprinkling water all over the place, including on their hedges...

General Nuisance

2007-09-16T18:36:00.000-04:00

When my kids were little, they were big on Richard Scarry books. I can't recall which of the many it was, but one of them featured a minor character named General Nuisance (I seem to recall him saying, "Won't you please get up, Mr. Soldier?" at reveille. Yeah, right.)

Well, I have the feeling that General Nuisance is about to visit our house, only it isn't really General Nuisance who's coming -- it's mild-mannered little Father Costin, who's coming to bless our house on Thursday. Nothing drastic, this is just his way of introducing himself to his parishioners and getting to know them better, and I think it's very sweet of him to want to visit everybody outside of the normal visitation cycle at Epiphany.

Here's the rub: Jim and I don't do a lot of entertaining, so our really-very-small house gets cluttered easily. All it takes is one or two pieces of paper, and, "Oh, I'll take care of this later," and inside of 24 hours, the place looks like a bomb hit it. Now, I cannot clean around a mess -- things have to be tidy before I can see the grime -- so there's also quite a bit of, well, grime around.

And Father C. has a reputation for being immaculate.

And Jim learned his cleaning skills in the military, where they did white-glove inspections once a week, and used to strip the floors and re-wax them on a weekly basis.

You see where this is going?!

I am very sure that my mild-mannered little priest would be horrified to think that he was causing so much Uproar in my house, but on the other hand, this is what happens when you get so busy with taking care of an old man's affairs that you Let Things Go. The kitchen table is still cluttered with various kinds of paperwork, and I remember my in-laws' house looking very much like ours does now, full of paperwork that they didn't want to lose track of (these people have never heard of, hello, FILING PAPER?!?!?!), so I shouldn't be surprised that their son has adopted their crummy habits.

So we will get our house in sufficient order that a civilized person can enter it and not run screaming to the Board of Health that he's about to come down with MRSA as a result of having set foot in our house. And it will promptly get as cluttered and grotty as it was before we cleaned it.

Sigh.

A Note from Our Son

2007-09-09T17:26:00.000-04:00

Yes, that's himself over there, doing his Nathan Fillion imitation (for those of you familiar with the defunct Fox Channel TV show "Firefly"). He says that the one on his left is very left-wing, and the one on his right is into Wicca, and all the rest are married. But I love the look on his face, so this is my current favorite Chris photo.

That's not what I'm blogging about, however. This note from him just came into my inbox:

BLET-backed bill would create rail expansion in New Hampshire

CLEVELAND, August 1 — The governor of New Hampshire signed a BLET-backed measure on July 27 that will help create railroad jobs and revitalize freight and passenger rail service in the state.

Governor Lynch's signing of New Hampshire Senate Bill 75 at Nashua City Hall in Nashua, N.H., establishes the New Hampshire Rail Authority Board, which will make it easier for railroad companies to make inroads in New Hampshire while creating new job opportunities for BLET members.

Establishing viable railroads would help spur economic growth in the state, Governor Lynch said. Also, "It will help reduce congestion on our roads, improving public safety and reducing air pollution."

The measure establishes a New Hampshire Rail Transit Authority that will have responsibility for developing and providing commuter rail and related rail transportation services in New Hampshire. The measure should help state lawmakers achieve a major rail transportation goal, which is the establishment of a high speed rail corridor between Boston and Montreal, via New Hampshire and Vermont.

According to William Remington, Legislative Representative of BLET Division 191 in Lunenburg, Mass., rail service in New Hampshire — with the exception of two Amtrak trains the Downeaster and Vermonter — is currently limited to tourist trains and a few shortline railroads.

"It was time for a change and we pushed for it," said Remington, who is also 3rd Vice Chairman of the Massachusetts State Legislative Board.

The BLET, in conjunction with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, worked for months to secure passage of the measure through the New Hampshire legislature.

The Senate bill, SB-75 (New Hampshire Rail Authority Board), passed by a vote of 189-120 and was signed by Governor Lynch on July 27, 2007. It became effective the same day. The House bill, HB-311 (Committee to Review Liability Issues for Commuter Rail Operations), was passed by a vote of 17-0.

Also, as part of the bill, Governor Lynch will appoint three board members — with rail experience — to the Rail Transit Authority. Their job will be to seek funding and open corridors that would bring commuter rail into the state, while protecting the interest of existing communities.

Dan Lauzon, 1st Vice Chairman of the Massachusetts State Legislative Board, and Wayne Gagne, a member of BLET Division 57 (Boston), played key rolls in testifying and furthering the legislation. Brother Remington said that George Newman, Chairman of the Massachusetts State Legislative Board, and Mike Twombly, Springfield Terminal-Delaware & Hudson General Chairman, were also extremely supportive and continually lent assistance throughout the process.

Also playing a large role was Dennis Caza, a D.R.I.V.E. Field Representative from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and a member of Teamsters Local 633.

"It is a great experience working with Brother Caza and look forward in working with him and the Teamsters again," Brother Remington said.

Brother Gagne also serves as Chairman of the New Hampshire Commuter Rail Advisory Committee. Brother Remington is the founder and first president of the New Hampshire Railroad Revitalization Association. He is also Legislative Representative of the New Hampshire Commuter Rail Advisory Committee and committee member of the New Hampshire Operation Life Saver.

*****

Now, I have no idea what BLET is, and as you may be able to deduce from all the "Brother"s in this post, it's from a union newsletter. However, this is great news for this household -- not only does it mean that Chris might eventually be able to find work even a bit closer to home (though compared to Philly, Enfield is heaven), but also -- we've been great fans of rail travel for a very long time. It worked for us as subway commuters in NYC, it worked for us whenever we wanted to go places in Germany, and it has worked for us ever since Amtrak's Downeaster inaugurated service from Portland, ME to Boston, MA in 2000. Every time we travelled to Philly to visit Chris, we took the train, and it's been a major annoyance not to be able to rely on mass transit to get places around NH.

I hope, I hope, I hope that is about to change.

Happy dancing in Rottenchester tonight!!

Update

2007-09-08T09:25:00.000-04:00

As usual, I have been up to no good. This past Tuesday, the fall semester at the University started, and I am repeating third-year Russian, not because I failed it, but because I found this past summer that I was actually able to use it, and now I want to refine it. Also, as the Russians say, "Repetition is the mother of learning" (повторение мать учение).

Then, this past Thursday, my priest, his wife, two ladies from church, and I travelled to Boston to hear the Sretensky Monastery Choir. WHOA. The best way to describe it was that it was a completely Russian experience. I heard more Russian on Thursday night than I hear in a whole year of Russian classes. The music wasn't all sacred -- lots of folk songs -- and after each and every one, either somebody would whistle, or this lady a couple of seats away from us would yell out, "Bravo, BRA-vo!" And the encore...well...they had translations for everything else they sang, but not the encore, so my Russian came in particular use then. Otherwise I would never have understood this:

"Russia was always holy, because it was always an Orthodox nation. Russia is holy, because it is an Orthodox nation. Holy Russia will always be an Orthodox nation!" Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Billy Graham!!

Finally, on a much lighter note, there's this:

You Scored an A

You got 10/10 questions correct.

It's pretty obvious that you don't make basic grammatical errors.

If anything, you're annoyed when people make simple mistakes on their blogs.

As far as people with bad grammar go, you know they're only human.

And it's humanity and its current condition that truly disturb you sometimes.

The It's Its There Their They're Quiz

Yep. That's me. The Grammar Nazi. Now you know why it matters so much to me that I get Russian grammar right.

It's Too Quiet

2007-08-23T12:28:00.001-04:00

Not in the way I used to mean it. Since Chris moved back to New Hampshire, it feels like he's home again, even though he lives two hours away, so it doesn't feel as deathly quiet around here as it used to (even though it actually is!).

No, what I'm referring to is that I've actually had a chance to catch up on all the fun things that I've let go over the past year, like needlework, and in doing so, I find I'm having too much time to think. (I have also been working on a new book, which limits my Thinking time -- a good thing, as you will see.) And what I find I'm Thinking about, is This Time Last Year.

I came a little too close to the Grim Reaper for comfort, frankly. Now, while the thought of dying doesn't bother me particularly, the thought of leaving behind the people I love just eats at me. Now I find that it's difficult to forget; I hear music that I heard from that time, or think, "This time last year, I didn't even have enough energy to pick up a needle," and the whole horror washes over me again.

I'm assuming this is a form of PTSD? Anyone else have this kind of thing, where, when horrible anniversaries roll around, you relive them? How did you cope?

Obviously, this isn't the first horrible thing that happened to me in life, but it took me 20 years to get over the last truly horrible thing, and I'd rather not take so long this time (for one thing, I may not have 20 years -- comforting thought!). I'd say, "There's always booze," but have been informed that with a background that's half Irish and half Russian, I should just surrender to my Inherent Alcoholism, and that's all I need to stay away from that particular "consolation." And I have never found therapy to be particularly helpful.

Any ideas?

What Color Crayon Are You?

2007-08-19T13:28:00.000-04:00

You Are a Green Crayon

Your world is colored in harmonious, peaceful, natural colors.
While some may associate green with money, you are one of the least materialistic people around.
Comfort is important to you. You like to feel as relaxed as possible - and you try to make others feel at ease.
You're very happy with who you are, and it certainly shows!

Your color wheel opposite is red. Every time you feel grounded, a red person does their best to shake you.

What Color Crayon Are You?

Update on New Kid

2007-08-16T15:12:00.000-04:00

A couple of people left comments on my post concerning the "New Kid on the Block," so I thought I'd respond this way.

Catherine -- it just gets better and better. He's just such a nice person. New priests often come with an Agenda. Fr. Dean saw himself as revitalizing an aging community, and he did -- unfortunately, he also stepped on a lot of older toes to do that, and people got hurt. The last priest seemed to have as his agenda closer ties with the heterodox community, which wouldn't have been a bad thing, if it hadn't also involved little gems like "icons" of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic (from those Bridgebuilders crackpots), ecumenical services that included the local rabbi giving a sermon while standing in front of the icon of the Annunciation, and those little girls Going Where No Orthodox Little Girl Had Ever Gone Before -- I've crabbed enough about that that I don't feel the need to go into it again.

(By the way, in case anyone is actually buying "icons" from Bridgebuilders, I should note that I refer to them as "crackpots" because they so obviously subscribe to the theory that what makes an icon is the style of painting, and nothing more. You should have seen my priest's face when I made mention of their "icon" of Harvey Milk, the San Francisco official who was gunned down because he was gay. This is the kind of thing they get up to.)

Fr. Costin, to give the New Kid his name -- Fr. Costin also has an agenda. As he said to me, "People will forget about their petty grievances when they return to their spiritual focus." If it's possible to fall in love spiritually, I think I've just done that! :D

Elizabeth -- it wasn't the old priest who told Fr. Costin that I would "turn against him," but a member of the parish council who is best described as an Old Woman. The poor soul used to be a very responsible member of the community till he had a stroke; now he can't practice in his former profession, and seems to spend his days lurking around the church and finding things to gossip about. This is why this particular bit of gossip doesn't bother me for my own sake, but it does hurt in the sense that this nice young priest must be wondering when and how he's going to get hit between the eyes. I won't say "Never" -- I'm sure that eventually, we'll have some kind of difference of opinion -- but I hope we can resolve it, as I did my differences with Fr. Dean. It's when people won't listen that eventually, I just stop trying.

I'd like to try to get a picture of these people so I can put it up on my blog. They are just such a cute family!

When You Have Too Much Time on Your Hands...

2007-08-15T18:07:00.000-04:00

...this is what you get up to.

This is an adaptation of an Ellen Maurer-Stroh cross-stitch design of roses and lilies. I charted them out on top of a St. Olga cross, and the idea is to stitch this design onto at least two analoy covers: one for the main analogion in the church itself, and one for the analogion that stands in the narthex. There are four other analogia, and for them I will stitch a plain St. Olga cross, no flowers -- I have to make some kind of progress. ;-)

New Kid on the Block

2007-08-11T08:52:00.001-04:00

Over the past six or so years, all my readers have been very patient with me as I've done my "wandering Jew" act through various jurisdictions and parishes -- something I do truly deplore, but with my home parish having become something of a laboratory for the Orthodox/Catholic experiment, I didn't feel I had much choice. The ROCOR parish where I would have preferred to settle folded when its priest took up a new post; we tried going to that parish for a couple of years, but the distance proved to be too much, and we finally settled on a parish some 40 miles away, where at least I knew I could trust the priest not to do anything too Innovationist. At the same time, every other week we would attend Liturgy at a very small Greek parish nearby, which only has Liturgies every other week. It worked out well enough, though I never really felt at home in the 40-miles-away parish.

Well - my original parish is finally freed from the "Latin Yoke" ;-> and we have a new priest! This one's a corker: He's from Romania. He has his Bachelor's from Harvard, and his Ph.D. from CalTech in Theoretical Physics (!!!) - no idea where his Master's is from - and says he never had any real exposure to Christianity until he and some friends bicycled from CalTech to a Romanian parish about an hour away. The priest there gave a very powerful sermon about confession, and this guy decided then and there that he had to make some radical changes in his life. "Radical" is the word -- from Theoretical Physics to Metaphysics?! God love him!

Now, when Fr. Dean was in charge of this parish, I used to chant weekday Liturgies for him. When the "Latin" priest was in charge, I actually developed nodes on my vocal cords, so was unable to sing for three years, and by the time they cleared up, he had made other arrangements for a weekday chanter, so I was out of a job -- just as well, since over those three years it became obvious that this was not someone you could work with. (He has a "don't confuse me with facts" personality.) Since those "other arrangements" consisted of his oldest son, and that whole family is gone now, I thought, maybe this new priest would need a weekday chanter. So I introduced myself to him.

It turned out that my reputation had preceded me: The new priest had already talked to Fr. Dean! =:0 So we hit it off very well from the start, and I actually have had the chance to sing for him at Paraklesis, and on the Feast of the Transfiguration. He's also interested in my needlework.

Now for the rabbit punch: After Paraklesis on Monday, he was blowing off a little steam because the actual chanter of the parish, the guy who sings on Sundays, was supposed to be there, and wasn't. As Father said, it puts a tremendous strain on his own voice to have to sing everything, which he did because he's just been teaching the Paraklesis melodies to me. I forget now how we got on the topic, but I said something about, "I don't know what you've heard about me from the parish" - this is a parish that loves to gossip, and never puts a good light on anything when there's a possible bad explanation - and he said, "They tell me that you will turn against me."

With friends like these....

What bothers me about that is not that it's untrue - I can see why these wahoos would come up with that kind of explanation - but that someone was so eager to get his knife into me that he would disturb the peace of mind of a new young priest to do it. Okay, maybe he was just trying to prepare the priest for that eventuality; it certainly happened with the last priest, though there were actual reasons for my "turning against" him, and when I explained these to the new priest, he understood that he hadn't gotten the whole story. And I suspect, from comments passed over the past six years, that my not singing for the Latin priest was interpreted as leaving in a snit; as I said, why look for a real explanation when there's a bad spin to put on it?

Be that as it may, I like this new young fellow very much. He's enthusiastic without being pushy, he has a singing voice to die for, and frankly - I like that he's from an Eastern Bloc country. This says to me that he has really struggled for his faith, that he's not Orthodox "because Greeks are Orthodox," but understands the necessity for spiritual growth - actually, he's a lot like Fr. Dean. I can't wait to see what his Bible studies are like. His sermons are already a hoot, since he brings a lot of science into them - as one of the Jordanville monks once said to me, it's so interesting to see how priests bring their former lives into their sermons.

And meanwhile, I will also have to deal with the ill will of my former parish. But that I'm not too worried about, mostly because they seem to think their opinion actually should matter to me, and of course it doesn't - as long as the "new kid on the block" and I are able to communicate well. So far, so good!

New Name

2007-08-09T10:24:00.001-04:00

Back in February, I posted about the newest "member" of our family, my new red Toyota Matrix. At the time, she was Molly. She has a new name, "Minnie." (Which I don't especially care for -- makes me think of Minnie Mouse. I liked Mimi, but the hubster, loyal son of Das Vaterland that he is, says it's "too French." Sigh.)

Anyway, what occasioned the name change was meeting an actual person named Molly at the Summer School. Charity forbids my saying very much about this, umm, interesting person, except to note that she was a third-year student this year, and is the only person I have ever seen conduct a choir with a hula motion. Most of us conduct with the "opposable thumbs" approach, i.e., we move our arms in opposite directions from each other. Molly conducted by moving her arms in the same direction at once. She did get her certificate -- I'm not sure if it was because she didn't fall apart altogether during the final exam, or because they would do anything to make sure she didn't come back.

She had other idiosyncrasies. Let's just leave it at that. But I knew that if I ever referred to "Molly" again, it wouldn't be my little red car I'd be thinking of. Hence, the name change.

And, just before we left for Jordanville, we got another Toyota Matrix. This one's pure white, and its name is "Snoopy." It started out life as "E. B." (the hubster being an admirer of E. B. White), but "Snoopy" fits it much better. Its purchase was occasioned by a broken tie rod, followed by the discovery that all the other tie rods on the car were also in shaky condition, and fixing one of these puppies, in this neck of the woods, costs upwards of $400. Plus, the car was a 1994 Escort -- hard to find parts for it, at this point. Plus, the floor was rusting out altogether, and in NH, your car doesn't pass the state inspection if the floor is rusted. (Doesn't matter if the headlights are out of balance, or even if the tie rods are about to fall apart -- as I learned one September, after a state inspection the previous month -- but that floor had better be good and solid. Go figure.)

Fortunately, we paid cash for the first car, so we only have one car payment to handle. But the hubster was considering retirement, before this latest discovery. Now - well, who knows?

He can't have been really 20, but...

2007-08-05T08:04:00.000-04:00

...he looked it, the young man standing in church four Sundays ago, up there in Jordanville. Very Russian-looking, short blond hair, slight build, looking very solemn and serious -- with three children clustered around him, two little girls about 7 or 8, and a little boy about 3. In the more conservative ROCOR churches, men stand on the right-hand side of the church, and women stand on the left, and usually, the children stand with the women, so this young man was all the more noticeable with his three little children clustered around him, each little girl holding a hand, and the little boy smack up against his front. And they just stood there, from about the Gospel onwards.

Now, because Jordanville is a hierarchical seat, services there take a long time. A Sunday Liturgy can take three hours. People wander in and out throughout; you get to a point where you need a "seventh-inning stretch," as my Church Slavonic instructor once put it, so you drift outside and sit for awhile, get some fresh air, then wander back in and find a place to stand. Not this family. They just stayed put the whole time, and let me tell you, those kids didn't move an inch. Yet there was no question of the affection between father and children; he let them do pretty much anything they liked with his hands, and when one of the little girls let go, his son (looked just like him!) promptly picked up the hand and put it on top of his head.

Then, just before Communion, the dad leaned down and whispered to one of the girls, who nodded, and then he took off, leaving the three children behind. I saw them craning their necks to watch him go, and wondered what that was all about. A few minutes he reappeared--with an infant in his arms. And shepherded the three other children up for Communion, along with the infant.

This guy has four children.

I saw him for all the Sundays I was in Jordanville. The second Sunday, the kids stayed with him, and I was interested to see his method of "discipline": When the little boy put his hands into his pockets, the dad just reached down and gently removed the hands, then put them at the boy's side. And they stayed there. The third Sunday, I saw the same children, but this time with a sweet-looking young woman who actually let them sit down on one of the stools placed around the cathedral. It was amusing to note that they were actually a little wigglier with her around! At Communion time, dad reappeared--apparently, this time he had "infant duty"--and after Communion, those kids just moved to his side and stayed there, although mom was still in church.

When church let out, those kids reverted to being kids--not that they were remotely whiney, but just racing around all over the place, blowing off steam--and the parents just stood there talking, with the dad swinging the infant back and forth in its car seat, chatting easily with his wife and smiling. He certainly didn't come across as some kind of disciplinarian fanatic, but somehow, he had gotten across to his kids how to behave in church, and they did.

I couldn't help contrasting their behavior with the American kids I know, who are so rambunctious and make their presence such an ordeal for everyone around them--not necessarily at Liturgy, more like in the public sphere (like grocery stores), but even at church, kids raised by American parents are much more disruptive than these kids were. What is it about Russian parents and children? I mean, these weren't the only kids in church, but the only thing that made them noticeable was their father, who really did look about 20 years old. The other kids in church were just as well-behaved. As my husband said (he was there for the third Sunday, and I pointed out the family), they knew that church was a special place, and that they were supposed to have "church manners."

I wish I knew how Russians do it. And I wish they'd share the secret with today's parents.

Back to Our Sheep!

2007-08-04T12:43:00.001-04:00

Yes, I know I've been back for two weeks. The first week, Jim was still working from home, so the computer was virtually unavailable. The second week, while he was gone on a business trip -- believe it or not, I was still catching up from my trip to Jordanville!

And what a trip it was. It did rain quite a bit -- actually, just about every day -- but even so, the highs each day were in the 60s, which is my kind of weather (the kids from California, though, were freezing!). I did actually complete my goal, which was the first course in Church Slavonic -- whether or not I passed, is still up for grabs, since the grades appear not to have been submitted, but for the first time ever, I answered every single question on the test, so I'm hopeful. I met, of course, a number of young people who were utterly charming, as well as one lady a bit closer to me in age, who was helping out in the kitchen (bless her) and who is well known in ROCOR circles as a producer of Church music. (I don't want to use her name without her permission.)

And it was so nice to catch up with all the instructors out there, especially the Choral Methods instructor, Nikolai Alexeyevich Myshkin. Last time I was in Jordanville, he gave me his address and said I could write to him; but I held off doing that until I could do so in Russian. Well, I finally did write to him, all in Russian, at the beginning of June, thinking it would take a week or two to get there -- he told me he got my letter two hours before he was due to leave for the States! It took a whole month to get there! I sat in on a couple of his classes, which I had already taken and passed, just for the purpose of seeing how much I could pick up in Russian (he only teaches in that language, and people in the class provide the translation). I understood about half, and I find, since coming back home, that I'm much more willing to take a chance in writing in the Russian language.

WHOA! I HAVE BEEN WANTING TO DO THAT FOR 45 YEARS, AND NOW I'M DOING IT! You can't imagine the thrill!

I had a number of experiences out there that I'd like to blog about, but don't want this to become too long, so I will just post this last bit, and then hope to post more during the week: On the Saturday when we were taking our final tests in the various subjects, I was having breakfast, cramming for Church Slavonic, when in walked that instructor. He sat down to have his own breakfast, and naturally, since he wasn't taking any tests, he proceeded to hold a conversation with one of the other non-students present. I listened in for a bit, then opened up my Slavonic notes and said, "Well, back to the salt mines." And this particular instructor added, "Or, as the Russians say, 'Back to our sheep.'"

SHEEP?!?!

I asked a couple of the native Russians there if they had ever heard that expression, and they told me that yes, it comes from a movie that was made a number of years ago, about two peasants who go to court over a charge of sheep-stealing. The movie was supposed to be a complete mock on the Soviet government, with the two peasants railing at each other about every conceivable aspect of their lives, and periodically the judge would bang his gavel and yell, "Back to our sheep!" The Russians use this expression nowadays to mean, "Let's get back to business."

And so, those of you who read this blog -- "Back to our sheep!" Let's get back to blogging!

And Speaking of Singing...

2007-07-04T15:45:00.000-04:00

...as I was a couple of posts ago, I'm off on Friday for two weeks of singing Russian Orthodox Church music.

There's a monastery in upstate New York, not too far from the Baseball Museum in Cooperstown, which hosts the Summer School of Liturgical Music for two weeks every summer. If you go through all the courses, over a three-year period, you are certified as a choir director and/or Reader in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. I completed this course in 2003, went back in 2004 to help out in the kitchen (and sing, of course), missed it in 2005 for my grandson's second birthday -- I'll never do that again -- and last year, well, we know about that.

So I need this course this year. I plan to take a couple of refresher courses in Choral Conducting Methods and Church Music History, and, never having passed Church Slavonic, I really want to take that course for a (ahem) fourth time. Well, come on, most folks who take it at least have to read the stuff in church on Sundays. Until a few years ago, I never even knew it existed.

Now, I do attend a Greek church. So why am I taking courses in Russian Orthodox choral singing? Well, apart from the chance to sing four hours a day, with music composed by the likes of Rachmaninov, when I began the course I was in fact a choir director. Shortly after completing the first third of the course, my choir and I had a falling out, and I have not conducted since then, but the course material itself is so compelling that I just had to go back and finish it out, and I did.

However, there is now an ulterior motive: We have a new priest. I have met him, like him very much, and spoken with him at length about the parish, the choir, and the fact that although there are a number of Russians in the area, they don't seem to feel awfully comfortable at our church. They show up for Pascha, then crawl back into the woodwork until the next year. He would like to change that.

My husband points out that any such effort is likely to put a number of Greek noses far out of joint, and he's probably right about that. Some folks in the parish are still in a snit that they've had to put up with a non-Greek priest for the past six years, and the new priest is also not Greek, but Romanian. Still, seven years ago they didn't even want to have English in the parish, and now they use it all the time, so I hope that there's hope. If you focus on the Church as a spiritual hospital, this isn't usually a problem, but if you focus on it as an ethnic club, that's where the sparks fly. Will keep you all posted how this goes.

Meanwhile, I shall shortly be off for my spiritual "fix" for the year. I need it.

Tagged by Emily

2007-06-18T10:28:00.000-04:00

See links to other blogs at right. I wasn't specifically tagged, but she said, "anyone reading this post," so Good Little Do-Bee that I am, I thought I'd play along.

Rules: After posting these rules, each player proceeds to list 8 relatively random facts/habits about himself/herself. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, leaving them a comment on their blogs to let them know.

1. Although I love to sing, I'm not all that wild about opera. Go figure.

2. Speaking of singing, my late aunt told me once that I could sing before I could talk. Whoa.

3. I have never been able to sit around in my jammies for very long, and prefer to get dressed the second I get up.

4. I loved being a secretary. If I'm not sitting at a typewriter or keyboard, I don't feel as if I'm working.

5. I would have loved to have at least half a dozen children, but got a late start. Sigh.

6. I am a shocking housekeeper, despite really loving a clean and tidy home. It's tempting to say that it's hard to be clean and tidy when living with a packrat, but I seem to have developed tendencies along those lines myself.

7. If my chores aren't done by 9:00 a.m., they won't get done at all.

8. Despite my terror of flying, I actually do hope to make it to Russia one day.

Tagging: anyone who reads this blog, since I appear to have just six readers, per Bloglines.

You Must See This

2007-06-17T08:44:00.000-04:00

Over on the right are links to my favorite blogs ("Other Sheep of This Fold"). Click on Nancy's (Treasured Heart) to see something that -- well, it took my breath away. You do have to let it run for a couple of seconds before you realize what it's about, and turn up the sound -- it's well worth it.

Update: Paul Potts won the competition! Elizabeth, God bless her, has posted all three of his performances on her blog, and when I clicked on over to You-Tube, there was also a clip of the announcement that he was the winner. Just thrilled for this guy, and so very, very pleased that culture is not dead, after all.

Dictionary definition of "Margaret"

2007-06-17T08:40:00.001-04:00

How could I resist?

Margaret --

[noun]:

A real life muppet

'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Red Alert

2007-06-08T17:10:00.001-04:00

Ever since last August -- I think we all know what happened then -- I have had a really difficult time keeping to my prayer rule. At that time, I'm sure it was just sheer physical exhaustion, as my body recovered from a major assault on it, and then from a life-threatening illness (turns out that MRSA kills a lot of people). Also, dh was home a great deal, and over the years, he's made it plain that he thinks prayer is for "holy rollers."

Well -- his tune has gradually changed, and since he's been home this past month, recuperating from his own stay in the hospital -- I think I blogged about that -- he doesn't seem to mind my praying so much. This week, when I reminded him that I was fasting (he wanted to fix me eggs for breakfast), he just said, "Oh! Okay!" This is a major change for him.

So there isn't too much excuse for the fact that I managed a bare minimum, sometimes, of prayer rule throughout Lent and the Paschal season. I'm just starting to get into it a bit more regularly now. It's embarrassing; I'll have to bring it up in confession; but until today, I haven't been able to figure out what the problem is.

Today I got it. Now I just have to remember it, which is why I'm blogging about it.

When Jim's home, I'm on nonstop Red Alert, a military term for, "Be ready to leap into action at a moment's notice." Yep, that's me.

What happened this morning was that as I was debating whether or not to get into my prayer rule, at 8:30 a.m. (it takes about an hour to do the whole thing), Jim suddenly shouted, "Do you consider this redundant?" and proceeded to quote a sentence that, well, actually was redundant. He does this all the time, bouncing grammar rules off me; he's actually very savvy with the English language himself, but if he isn't sure about a point, it's me he comes to. And while it's flattering, it's also very interfering.

"Would you put a semicolon here?"

"Is a colon followed by one space or two?" (It's two. Semicolons are one space.)

"How does this sound to your ear?" (Reads the rough draft of a report he's doing for work.)

"How many days did I work from home last month?"

Etc.

When he goes into Boston to work, this is not a problem, only when he works from home. Sometimes I feel like saying, "There is life in Rochester when you aren't here, I don't live in a state of suspended animation until you get home, so please stop acting as if I had nothing better to do all day than dance attendance on you." In the heat of the summer, it gets real interesting; he leaves off working around 3:00 (having worked since 6:00 a.m., so all you taxpayers are still getting your money's worth!), and then I'm supposed to Drop Everything at a moment's notice so we can drive up to his favorite swimming hole, where he swims for a couple of hours while I work on embroidery and stew about dinner, which I will still have to prepare when we get back home. Why do I have to go along? It's More Fun with me along.

Do any of you married women have a similar situation, or is this yet another manifestation of the Generation Gap?!?!

And you single gals: Think about this, when you get to hankering after being married. You don't have a life. You're on nonstop Red Alert.

White Flower

2007-06-06T05:33:00.000-04:00

With thanks to Philippa:

You Are a White Flower

A white flower tends to represent purity, simple beauty, and modesty.
At times, you are dignified like a magnolia.
And at other times, you represent great ecstasy, like a white orchid.
And more than you wish, you're a little boastful, like a white hydrangea.

What Color Flower Are You?

HO-LY COWWWWWWWWW...

2007-05-30T17:13:00.001-04:00

...as Phil Rizzuto used to say when Mickey Mantle would knock one clear over the bleachers.

This morning I finally got to watch "Ostrov," or "The Island," in English, a Russian film with English subtitles that I have been reading about since last December. I did buy it as far back as February -- didn't know that there were two different formats for watching this baby. The European format is PAL, and it's supposed to be superior to NTSC, which is the American format -- so why aren't we using NTSC (referred to, by a priest of my acquaintance, as "Never The Same Color")? Go figure.

Anyway, I am still reeling. Everyone said, "You gotta see this film, it's a must-see," and I concur. Absolutely. The only caveat I would add is that it really helps to be Orthodox; otherwise, the protagonist just looks like a nut. But if you're Orthodox, you understand up front that he's a Fool-for-Christ, and that his wacko behavior is what makes possible the many miracles that take place in the movie.

It's also a good reality check for those of us who aspire to the monastic state. In the beginning of the film, during WWII, he's humping coal on a barge, and 30 years later, at the monastery, he's still humping coal, keeping the monastery's fires stoked. This is not an easy thing to do in a Soviet-era monastery; the Soviets made sure that living conditions were, well, unliveable, and there many scenes that show just how difficult this monk's life is, even by monastic standards.

What I came away with: All of us really are called to this radical way of life. Not to giving up our homes and families, or those things that go along with having homes and families, but those little luxuries we allow ourselves (like that ice cream I had when I got home from shopping because "I needed to make room in the freezer". Really. Honest to Pete).

I will have to watch this movie a lot more often to internalize it, but on first seeing -- it was, to me, a call to monasticism while living in the world. Oh, two other things I got from it: one, you don't choose the monastery, God places you in it (this monk would never have become a monk if he hadn't been dragged there by monks who were trying to save his life). And two, from a scene where the monk is reading Psalm 1, "Blessed is the man": "He shall bring forth his fruit in its season." In its season: How many of us try to rush this season? I sure do. I want fruit now. I keep forgetting that the same God Who created that peach tree out in my back yard, created me, and it's entirely possible that I'm no readier to bear fruit than that peach tree is, right this very second. I'll have to wait till September to slurp up its tiny, perfect peaches. And whatever season it is when I'm ready to bear fruit: that's not for me to know.

Get this movie, if at all possible.

Phew

2007-05-26T07:41:00.000-04:00

They found him. Turns out that when they (my sister and her husband) were on their way to my house, they passed an ambulance that was taking him to the hospital.

He had driven to Wal-Mart to get some plants (which was in his game plan). Now, my sister checked the parking lot at Wal-Mart, but never thought to check across the street -- he had turned into the Unicel parking lot and decided to take a nap. Folks there noticed that he wasn't getting out of his truck, so tapped on the window and asked if he was all right, and he explained that he was feeling sleepy and wanted to get off the road. (I wish everybody were that smart.) So they let him be, and just kept checking on him periodically.

Around 4:00 p.m., they found him unresponsive, so called an ambulance. The paramedics found that his body temperature was 106 degrees -- that's not a typo -- so transported him to the hospital. After they got him back down to normal, they released him.

While he was there, they ran an EKG and an EEG, and found him to be in fantastically good health. Now, here's the kicker: While the rest of us are Eating Healthy and trying to exercise and not having too much success watching our weight, Dad eats a diet of meat and potatoes -- his lips haven't tasted a vegetable probably since his mother weaned him, he's been to the doctor four times in his life (and one of those was his Army physical), and having been raised by Polish peasants, he thinks nothing of eating food that's been in the fridge for a couple of weeks. And he has the constitution of a 30-year-old. His exercise has always consisted of home improvements and, since they moved to NH, raking leaves. Period.

We were freaking out because if he had become disoriented, who knew where he'd end up: New York? Canada?? As I said to my sister, "If he missed the turnpike exit for Milton [where they live], he could be halfway to Canada by now and have no idea where he is."

So, to answer the obvious question of why is he driving at his age: We have been trying to get the keys away from him for the past six or seven years. One day, the police called my sister (he lives with her): They had found him driving down the middle of the road, over the double yellow line. When the cop pulled him over, doubtless thinking, "Boy, I've got a live one," Dad explained that he was driving there to avoid the potholes in the road. Okay. The cop said, "But what about oncoming traffic?" And Dad said, "Well, there isn't any. When it comes, I'll get over." Annie said, "Please take the keys away." And the cop said, "We can't. We can only do that if he hasn't passed his driving test."

In NH, you have to take a road test every time you renew your license, if you're over 75. Dad's last road test was last year. Among other things, it involves driving on a very heavily-travelled 55-mph highway. And he isn't all that confused, normally, though over the past few months, it's getting obvious. Well -- I'm hoping this scare will give my sister the courage she needs to take the keys. He will make her life miserable if she does, though.

Thanks, all, for the prayers. I'm still waiting for someone to tell me how living into your 90s is supposed to be a good thing.

Dad's Missing

2007-05-25T17:31:00.000-04:00

My sister just stopped by our house to let me know that my 92-year-old stepfather has been missing since noon today. She last saw him at the cemetery where my mother is buried, and said that he seemed disoriented; she put him into his truck, made him drink some water he had there, and told him to go straight home. He never got there, she and her daughter have been to all his usual haunts, and there's no sign of him.

Now, he makes this trip to the cemetery at least twice a week, so he shouldn't have become disoriented that easily; plus, his bank is on the same street, and he goes there once a week, so this is not unfamiliar territory. But he has been getting vague of late, and of course, now she's kicking herself for not having foreseen that he couldn't drive ten miles from Point A, where he goes 2-3 times a week, to Point B, where he lives.

OK, somebody want to go into this with me one more time, why old age is supposed to be such a freaking blessing?!?!?!

Thrice Blessed

2007-05-19T08:37:00.001-04:00

I had intended to post this a couple of days ago, but life kept getting in the way. ;-)

On Thursday, dh and I celebrated 38 years of marriage. We began the day by attending Divine Liturgy for the Ascension, and after Liturgy, I asked my priest if I could sing a Te Deum to give thanks for the reunion of Moscow and ROCOR. Interestingly, my very Greek priest didn't know what a Te Deum was -- and I didn't know what it would be called in Greek, or even if it exists in Greek -- but once he understood what I wanted to do, he was all for it. I know this nifty Te Deum that I had to learn for my courses at Jordanville, so was able to sing the whole thing through in Slavonic.

After that, we went out to breakfast, and then spent the rest of the day just knocking around Maine -- went to Kennebunk and Cape Porpoise, and then drove back along the coast to a place called Cap'n Simeon's Galley for lunch. Great seafood (even if it was a non-fasting day... Sigh). It's nice to be able to visit old favorite haunts now and again, and this has been on our list of favorites for 21 years now, which is as long as we've lived in New Hampshire.

As someone pointed out, the Ascension and wedding anniversaries occur annually. But rarely do they occur on the same date. And added to that the joy of the reconciliation between the two Churches of Russia -- yeah, thrice blessed says it all.

BTW, I notice that today is the birthday of Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II. I have often read that he knew he was born on the feast of the Prophet Job, and expected to have a difficult reign, filled with tribulation. Incidentally, Nicholas and Alexandra, by Robert K. Massie, is quite enlightening on the subject of the Tsar-Martyr. What I like best about this book is that it was written by someone with absolutely no agenda; his only reason for researching the Romanovs was that his son had hemophilia, and in searching for famous hemophiliacs, he came across the Tsarevich Alexei. Then he began to research the Romanovs. Up to reading about them, the only thing he knew about them was all the Communist propaganda ("Commierot") about how awful they were, but his book shows that Nicholas truly tried his best to govern. Sure, he made mistakes. That's the best of Orthodox saints: they do make mistakes. What's rewarded is their efforts, not their successes. Боже, царья храни!

The Apron Pic

2007-05-15T09:53:00.000-04:00

Mimi had a great post about yesterday's having been Wear an Apron Day. With my usual Keeping on Top of Current Trends skill, I am a day late with this, but here is my apron pic. Note that, despite all the fussing I did over there about a real apron's having a bottom ruffle, mine doesn't. Sigh. What it does have is a gathered waist and a bib. If I were a lot thinner, the bib might actually cover something, but as it is, beggars can't be choosers, and at least this one has a bib and a pocket, the other essential for an apron.

I remember when these were standard wear, and no woman in any kind of mind, right or otherwise, would have been caught dead in her kitchen without her apron. On the other hand... Yesterday I was at a local cafe, where I go when I need to write (too many distractions at home), and I purchased a cuppa joe for the usual $1.00++. Some guy said to me, "Gee, remember when coffee was fifty cents?" And I had to laugh, as I came back at him, "I remember when coffee was ten cents." And I do.

I'm not kidding when I say I'm old.

OK, Why am I here??

2007-05-14T16:57:00.000-04:00

No, this is nothing radically existential -- I just forgot what it was I wanted to blog about. The joys of aging.

Well, at least I have reconnected with an old blog friend. Bloglines, which is supposed to help me keep track of all my favorite blogs, has a nasty habit of dropping people on me, so I don't know whose blog is missing until one day I say, "Hey, I haven't heard from So-and-So in awhile," and discover that their blog is gone from Bloglines, and I can't remember their blog address. This happened with Paradosis, Catherine, Alanna, Philippa, and Emily. I was especially annoyed to lose this last because this girl belongs to my former parish, and only became Orthodox a year ago, and I'm very fond of her godmother.

Fortunately, she left a comment on my last post, and I was able to track her down that way. So now I'm back in touch with my young friend, and with several of my older friends, too ("older" in the sense of how long we've been friends, not in the sense of age -- as far as I know, I've got 'em all licked).

Well, so! I see that my former parish is getting a new priest. Mostly, I'm sorry to hear that; while this priest was a bit too "Catholic" for me personally (those girls on the solea, and in the Great Entrance, have always fried my excessively orthodox brain!), I know many people were horrified to lose him, and his going has been very divisive for this parish. On the other hand, there's always the hope that the next priest will be a bit more Orthodox in his practice, though I don't know: his rumored successor has a quote from St. Theresa of Lisieux on his current parish's website. Yep, another ex-Catholic, and if this quote is anything to go by, not ex enough.

Yes, this is my problem. I had fifteen years of the old Catholic Church, which was a lot like the Orthodox Church, and fifteen years of the new Catholic Church, which is a lot like any Protestant church, and this year it will be thirty years since I last worshipped as a Catholic. And I'm still hypersensitive to it. I guess it's freaking me out to realize that there's a whole generation of middle-aged people who have never known the beauty of the old Catholic Church, and seriously think that the claptrap that's around nowadays is Catholicism -- and the most recent priests at my former parish are among this group. OK, 'nuff, before I seriously tick off all my friends. Pray for me, that I get over this sometime before I die.

NIFTY!!

2007-05-13T14:18:00.000-04:00

Dear Philippa has a nifty new thingie on her site called "Menologion." I followed the link, and now I have it too! I think hers is for the New Calendar, and mine is for the Old Calendar, so between us, we have the bases covered. ;-)

Chris is home for the weekend, and took me out to dinner for Mother's Day, along with Jim. We went to a seafood place, where I had a chicken Caesar salad -- Jim said, "Don't you want seafood?" and I replied, "When you eat seafood half the year, you learn to appreciate the half the year you don't have to." Ah, Orthodoxy.

(And I'm dying to add a family anecdote, about the year my son and daughter collaborated on a Mother's Day card for me that was signed, "Happy M---er's Day." The knitters among us will understand that there are certain words best not uttered aloud among us woolfolk.)

My third book is finished, at least the first draft. I plan to let it sit for a month or two until it's thoroughly out of my system, then go back and look for the inconsistencies and start editing it, cleaning it up, tightening the plot, and all that. Meanwhile, I'm at work on the fourth in the series, "Russians Unorthodox." It's completely unlike any of the other three; for one thing, it's told in the first person, and for another, I'm hoping to make it funny, at least in spots.

Oh, and I expect to edit the one book, "An Unorthodox Spy," and break it down into two books, which it was originally, only I couldn't think of a title for the second book. So if you happen to see references to "The Unorthodox Christian," and have already read the "Spy" blog, you've already read the first two books. Clear as mud?

OK, Deep Breath, Power Down....

2007-05-04T18:20:00.000-04:00

Once again, I am boggled by what nice people I know in the blogosphere. Thank you, one and all, for your support and prayers, and your offers to help -- just being here was an enormous help. Thank you.

Jim came home today. His bronchoscopy went well, they were able to biopsy the bit of lung tissue in question, and, as his doctor put it, "It's not an 'Oh my God' matter." (Love that esoteric medical terminology.) However, they still don't know what's causing the clots -- possibly because they only did an ultrasound on half of one leg, not all on both legs -- so he has to go for the gross tests sometime next week.

Of course I am not handling any of this well. Brings back too many memories of last summer. He even has to do the belly shots. He, having been brought up by a nurse, is 100% okay with all of this. I, having been brought up by normal people who only saw doctors for broken bones and DPT boosters, think he's fallen into the hands of ghouls. Oh, to top it all off: the belly shots are costing us around $140.00. And we have a prescription-drug benefit to our health insurance. Jokingly, I said to the pharmacist, "What does it cost without a drug benefit, $5,000?" And she said, "Yes." I hope she was kidding. I thought Jim would have a stroke on the spot.

I'm still trying to figure out what the point is of some hotshot medicine that has to be injected (ewww) into one's gut (EWWWWWWW) by oneself, that costs thousands of dollars. Not to mention the bubbly assurance, "And it doesn't even hurt." Let me tell you -- I had those shots, and I can guarantee you that no one who's prescribing these puppies has ever taken them.

Okay, I'm getting wound up again (ya think?!), so I will just make one further note: the guy I thought was the emergency-room doctor, isn't. He's something called a "hospitallist," and his job is to coordinate all the various medical procedures so that doctors with conflicting agendas don't prescribe conflicting treatments/medications/whatever. I like the idea of a hospitallist. I even somewhat like this particular hospitallist. Great bedside manner, and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt as to knowing his stuff -- he's the one who said the mass in Jim's lung wasn't cancer, and well, holy cow, he was right. What a shock. Okay, okay, for all you medical people, I'll shut up now.

For all you who have read my book, I have a question. I have to break up the two books in order to get the thing published, and I need a title for the first half. I'm kicking around "The Unorthodox Affair" -- does that sound like anything you'd buy? Does it sound like it summarizes the plot? My daughter, who read it faithfully every day when she got home from school (she'd hold out her hand and say, "Give"), thought "An Unorthodox Love" would work. Ideas, suggestions, rotten tomatoes???

Back on the Bicycle

2007-05-01T22:41:00.000-04:00

Thanks to all for prayers and responses. They are much appreciated, and much needed.

Today Jim saw the pulmonologist. There appears to be a disagreement between the emergency-room doctor and the pulmonologist. The ER doctor thinks the mass in the right lung is an infarction, that is, dead tissue that has necrotized over a very long period of time. The pulmonologist thinks it's cancer, and wants to do a broncoscopy, as well as an endoscopy and a colonoscopy, because after all, These Blood Clots Must Be Coming from Somewhere, and apparently, Hidden Cancers Can Cause Blood Clots.

The operative word, as far as I'm concerned, is "can." As in, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but why not go for broke and assume it is until we find out it isn't, at which point, why, we can do more vivisection, what fun!!! The ER doctor's point is, there are absolutely no risk factors for cancer: This guy isn't overweight, doesn't smoke, doesn't live with smokers, doesn't work in a carcinogenic environment, and lung cancer doesn't just show up for the hell of it!

Ya know what scares the living daylights out of me? Of course, all the nurses are pulling out the Sympathy Card that says, "Oh, yes, These Things Are Scary." Yeah, they're scary, all right, but not for the reasons most people find them scary. I find them scary because I can't escape the impression, based on my own rather vast experience, that my husband's life is in the hands of a HATFUL OF INCOMPETENT BOOBS WHO DON'T HAVE THE FAINTEST CLUE WHAT THEY'RE DOING!!!!!

To top it all off, when I walked in this evening, my brother was visiting my husband, and regaling him with his own hospital experience, which involved walking into another hospital's ER with severe pain in his right shoulder, and being kept overnight for cardio observation because he had Risk Factors (i.e., he's fat). The next day, they gave him a stress test and an echo-cardiogram, both of which he passed with flying colors, so he was discharged -- with his right shoulder still killing him. His own doctor diagnosed tendonitis. See, this is what gets me: The docs go into overdrive on their own pet theories, and completely ignore what's actually going on.

As I said to Jim, I can't advise him on how to handle this. I know what my own response would be, but that's not his response. He's inclined to let them do their vivisectionist thing. So all I ask is that he conduct his business with them without me anywhere in the vicinity, because if there's one thing I love for dinner, it's Doctor Stew.

Grumble, grumble, grouse, curses, kick the cat...

The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Writers....

2007-04-30T20:22:00.000-04:00

As readers of my book blog know, things are reaching a climax, at least in this first draft, and I had planned to finish off a chapter today. Hah.

Over the weekend, my husband started spitting up blood -- why do these things always start on weekends?! -- so this morning, he called our family physician, who told him to get to the emergency room. We got there around 9:30 a.m., and proceeded to spend the rest of the day there, while we dealt with x-rays and blood draws and CAT scans and heaven alone knows what else. But the bottom line is: dh has a pulmonary embolism, or blood clots in his lungs. We have no idea where they came from, how they got there, where they may have migrated from, how they came to lodge in his lungs -- we only know that breathing has become steadily more difficult for him since November, when he began not to be able to run his usual five miles/8 km, without having to stop for breath every so often, and that over the past week, he has had trouble breathing while walking the one mile to work. Then this business of spitting up blood.

It all "sux," but OTOH, maybe it will get him to think a little more seriously about his church relationships, or lack thereof -- when we got to the hospital, and he was asked his religion, he hemmed and hawed and finally said, "More Orthodox than anything else." So I hope there's hope.

Meanwhile, I intend to escape for a little while, if not to Moscow, at least to Brighton Beach. ;-)

The Saint Meme

2007-04-24T08:09:00.000-04:00

Cribbed from Elizabeth:

The task is to name four of your favourite Saints, one who was well on the way to sanctity, is widely venerated already and very likely to be made a Saint in due course, and one who isn't yet publicly declared a saint but probably should be made a Saint.

My votes:

St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco
St. Sergius of Radonezh
St. Xenia of St. Petersburg
The Holy Royal Martyrs (that's seven saints, actually, but I love 'em all): Nicholas II, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei

Blessed:
Fr Seraphim Rose

Should be made a Saint :
Elder Paisios of the Holy Mountain. One anecdote: He and his disciple Athanasios were standing in their cell praying, when suddenly the lamps started to sway as if stirred by a strong breeze, only there was no breeze. When they were done praying, Athanasios asked Paisios what that was all about. Paisios said, "Oh, the Holy Virgin likes to visit people on the Mountain [ie, Mount Athos] and see what they're up to." "And what did she see when she visited us?" "Why, she saw two idiots praying!" Anybody who can call himself an "idiot" when visited by the Holy Virgin gets my vote for sanctity. ;-)

Who would you choose ?

I tag Mimi, Philippa, and Catherine......... and anyone else who wants to play.

(And I must confess that I left in Fr. Seraphim, who was mentioned on Elizabeth's blog, only because I don't know of anyone else who's as widely venerated but not yet a saint. I'd appreciate hearing other people's nominations.)

Barking Mad

2007-04-17T18:03:00.000-04:00

A very dear internet crony, who has been feeding my ego by reading my books ;-) came up with the phrase "barking mad" to describe one of my characters, who is indeed slightly batty. A crank. Just at the moment, that's a bit how I feel.

I live next door to a Catholic church. Regardless of what we are all supposed to think about Catholicism (namely, that God Loves Them Too and that we should Pray That We May One Day All Be One, etc.), the fact remains that after Vatican II, they became horribly Protestant in their entire tone and structure. Their substance remains Catholic (and therefore, by Orthodox understanding, flawed), but the form has radically changed.

This particular church is about typical of most Catholic parishes I've seen in action: lots of emphasis on Peace and Justice Issues, lots of Programs, and lots of congregational singing of mostly Protestant hymns. Now, some Protestant hymns are gems--I'm thinking in particular of the hymns written during the Reformation, and those by the great J. S. Bach--but post-Bach, there came to be a movement known as the Quietist Movement, or maybe it was the Pietist Movement. Anyway, those marvellous old Reformation hymns were all transformed into 4/4 meter and rhythm, referred to by one Orthodox musician as the Plod of God, and so help me, he was right.

This place next door has an electronic carillon, and they play a lot of Plod-of-God hymns. Most of the year, I have to put up with, "Immac-u-LATE Mary, THY praises we-he sing," which gets old when you hear it twice a day, every day. At Paschaltide, however, they change the record, so now I listen to a variety of Plod-of-God hymns. This evening's was "The Church's One Foundation is Jesus Christ, Her Lord," which at least doesn't repeat the same dratted thing over and over.

My particular pet peeve, though, is, "Jesus Christ is risen today." As in, "A-a-a-a-ahhh-lay-hay-loo-hoo-ya." You know the one:
"Are try-umph-ant ho-ly- day-hay, a-a-a-a-ahhh-lay-hay-loo-hoo-ya."

In sheer defense of my own sanity, I have had to compose my own lyrics:
"Cheerless on the path we've trod, a-a-a-a-ahhh-lay-hay-loo-hoo-ya,
Marching to the Plod of God, a-a-a-a-a-a-lay-hay-loo-hoo-ya!"

Please, PLEASE, somebody tell me you have heard a version of this hymn that actually SOUNDS triumphant and glorious?!?!? Otherwise, I shall shortly join my (very peripheral) character in the Barking Mad category. Thank you.

Into the Dark

2007-04-16T19:02:00.000-04:00

I noted, a few posts back, that I had returned to writing, and that this latest book in a series was dark. It just got darker, in ways I had not anticipated.

I began the series by wanting to write just one book, a simple romance about an American cop and a Russian cop. (I should note that I have a lot of cops in my family -- as the joke goes around here, there are more cops in our family than some of the local forces have cops.) And then I got curious about their life in Happy-Ever-After-Land, and wrote a second book that had some dark elements, but conquered them all. And there it ended, for fifteen years, while I focused on becoming Orthodox, not just by chrismation, but in mind and heart, as well.

Smack in the middle of Great Lent, the third book in the series presented itself almost fully written -- at least fully outlined, in terms of what happened to this young family after Trouble descended on it -- and I have been churning that out, consistently writing at least one-third of a chapter every day. When it started, I just wanted to bring "people" (namely, me!) up to date on how things resolved in their lives, and bring them to the next level of Life After Police Work. There would be a lot of stuff about interrogation -- not making it too ugly, since it seems that even the KGB has caught on to the idea that police work is a profession -- and setting the stage for the head of my little household to decide that Police Work Is for the Young, i.e., retirement therefrom and entry into the next level of his life. That's all.

And then, looking for quotes about treason -- I like to start my chapters with quotes -- I found a good one by Aldrich Ames, the American who fed the KGB an enormous amount of intelligence about its people who were spying for the US. And, to my shock, I realized that I was writing about real people without having been aware that that's what I was doing. There really was a KGB general who spied for the US. There really was a list of names to be conveyed from one "side" to the other -- admittedly, in my story the names were to be conveyed from the KGB to the FBI, and not, as in actual fact, the other way around, but still.

And I found that my youthful and idealistic KGB officer was physically revolted by his father's treason. In other words, this tale is going far beyond any place I had ever intended to take it, and has begun to explore the human toll of treason, the people it affects far beyond the actual players in the international chess game known as espionage.

Where is this coming from?! When I started, I knew who Aldrich Ames was, and that was all. I never read any aspect of his story; beyond a mild "Oh, for crying out loud," I wasn't even especially affected by his arrest. Now....

Well, as I wrote in the initial post about my latest literary effort, your characters take you over and make you tell their story. All you are, is a chronicler. The KGB officer Sergei Makarov doesn't exist, I don't think, though there is a hockey player by that name (and evidently a darned good hockey player, too). His vivacious American wife doesn't exist, either -- well, she does, because she's patterned after my sister Anne, but my sister Anne is married to a very solid son of New Hampshire, and besides, she's Polish. But somehow, people who don't exist have a story to tell, and they intend to see it told, and they are co-opting other lives in order to tell it. And that story is about...betrayal. Treason. And a love that overcomes the darkest corners of the human heart.

I just wish I understood why I'm the one telling it.

The Lit Nerd

2007-04-16T08:30:00.000-04:00

Cribbed from Elizabeth's blog. Disappointing that this code apparently doesn't show how you scored on other types of Nerddom, because the actual test did: I scored about 80% as a Music Nerd, maybe 60% Drama Nerd, 50% Artistic Nerd, 30% Gamer/Computer Nerd (probably because I spend upwards of six hours a day online!), 20% Science/Math Nerd, 10% Social Nerd, and 0% Anime Nerd (what is anime, anyway????). Ah, well, back to "litting." ;-)

What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Literature Nerd Does sitting by a nice cozy fire, with a cup of hot tea/chocolate, and a book you can read for hours even when your eyes grow red and dry and you look sort of scary sitting there with your insomniac appearance? Then you fit this category perfectly! You love the power of the written word and its eloquence; and you may like to read/write poetry or novels. You contribute to the smart people of today's society, however you can probably be overly-critical of works. It's okay. I understand.
Musician
Drama Nerd
Artistic Nerd
Gamer/Computer Nerd
Science/Math Nerd
Social Nerd
Anime Nerd
What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace

Affirmation!

2007-04-11T17:44:00.000-04:00

I have mentioned in a number of places that my current favorite TV show is NCIS, which is on on Tuesday evenings. The medical details of autopsy gross me out, but I absolutely love the interplay among all the characters, especially the Mark Harmon and David McCallum characters (i.e., my generation) with their four much younger colleagues.

Last night's episode was about one of the younger characters who leads a shadow life as a writer. He has already published one novel, and is working on a second; and someone was going around bumping off real-life people who were the models for characters in his second book. What was unnerving to him was that no one, he thought, had yet seen any drafts for the second book -- it turned out he had an obsessed fan who was going through his trash and reading his typewriter ribbons to get an idea of what the second book would be about, and was trying to "protect" the main character, based on Agent McGee, from anyone he thought was trying to "off" him. (Slight anomaly here: The character, McGee, creates his books on a manual typewriter. Anyone who has used manual typewriters, which is what I learned on, knows that those ribbons were used over and over and over -- there's no way you could read anything off those puppies. Apparently the scriptwriters were thinking of old electric typewriters that used to have single-use ribbons!)

Anyway, what was so interesting to me was listening to McGee describe his creative process, the way the characters took over his life, the way he couldn't predict the end of his novel because he didn't know what it was yet, the way the characters tell their own story, and he just writes it down. Then there were the little quirks, the manual typewriter, the jazz he uses to jump-start his writing (I have to write by hand in a certain size notebook, for crying out loud). I found myself nodding like a bobble-head at everything McGee was saying, and I thought: Yes, that's exactly what happens to me! I guess I am a writer, after all! :D

Different Profile Pic

2007-04-10T16:00:00.000-04:00

Having seen other folks' nifty cartoon characters, I thought I'd look into getting my own, and came up with a Yahoo avatar. I hope this works:

Updates on Various Matters

2007-04-03T07:07:00.000-04:00

Many of you have been kind enough to e-mail me privately, asking about Chris, so I thought I'd satisfy everyone's questions with a public blog: He's fine. Now that the first shock has worn off, he's had a chance to evaluate and to realize how "lucky" (read: blessed!) he was, that things weren't much worse.

At the time, he thought he was without auto insurance, which is not mandatory in NH. He had had auto insurance when living here, which he transferred to PA when living there, but when he called to change his insurance back to a NH policy, he was told he would have to cancel the PA policy and then re-apply for a NH policy. So he went ahead and cancelled the PA policy, then found himself working day shift and was unable to apply for a NH policy.

We have dealt with this insurance company for 25 years, and I find that they are the best company out there (Amica), so last Sunday (after the accident), I said, "Let's give them a call and see if there's a grace period." Well -- I still don't know if there's a grace period, but his PA insurance is in effect until he gets his NH insurance! So they are covering the accident under the old policy, and then he can get NH insurance. This time, I'm sure he'll make a point of it.

As for the rest of Life -- it's pretty much the same as everyone else's, at least everyone who reads this blog. Getting ready for Pascha. I read everywhere about what a rough Lent it's been for everyone, and as you know, it's been rough for me, too -- not just in dealing with the sudden taking over of my mind by about 15 fictional characters, but also in the ongoing struggle to get my father-in-law's financial affairs in order. So much of this involves pensions from the City of NY, and New York bureaucrats could teach classes in stonewalling to those boobs down in Washington -- I've never seen so many hoops to jump through, and it's Jim who has to jump through them all, because he has the Power of Attorney. Just when his bosses are pressuring him to step up his production, too. I have been handling the other Money Stuff, taxes and stock holdings and trying to get his address changed -- I've lost track of the number of changes of address I've submitted, and I've come to the conclusion that no one in New Jersey knows how to read.

And all this when you're supposed to be focussing on your spiritual life, and on improving your relationship with God, not with your stockbroker. Then there's the usual Church Tension between dh and me. Jim just does not understand the "draw" of church. I mentioned that I would be attending a 6:00 a.m. Holy Thursday Liturgy, and he about flipped out: "That means you have to leave home at 5:00!!!" "Yeah, well, I've been doing it for the past I forget how many years, three or four." And he starts on a rant about Insensitive Priests who schedule services at Ridiculous Hours. I pointed out that this particular priest, whom I love dearly, has services this early so that people who work can still get there, and that it means that that priest, who lives a lot closer than I do, has to get up at 4:00 a.m. to do this for his flock; it falls on deaf ears.

But I know you will all understand what I'm saying when I write: If you love something or someone, there is no such thing as exigency. Love doesn't say, I'll do this, but only so far. When you love greatly, there is no such thing as "too much." (If you have kids, I don't need to say another word!) I can get up for a 6:00 a.m. Liturgy at 4:30 a.m., drive the 40 miles/70 km to get there, and wish I could do even more. I'll be in church every night this week, except last night -- I do try to accommodate dh when I can -- but I wish I could just live at church during Holy Week. As my priest said this past Sunday, "Lent was about us. Holy Week is about Him."

It's not about Obligation. It's about Love.

Glory to God for All Things

2007-03-27T09:31:00.000-04:00

Well, yes. I should have posted about this as early as Sunday. But I was offline all weekend, so spent most of yesterday catching up, and on Sunday, this was still too raw to write about:

Chris had an accident at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday.

I hasten to add that he is completely all right, other than being shaken up. This could have been so much worse.

He had been at a party in Concord, NH, about an hour away from both his home and ours, and finally left at 12:45 a.m. The weather was not good; it had been sleeting for most of the evening, and although the snow wasn't sticking to the roads, there was, of course, ice. He was almost home -- maybe about five miles away from home -- when his truck hit a patch of black ice that was covered over by snow and fishtailed. He fought the skid, lost control of his truck, and it spun completely around, went into the westbound lane of the road, flipped over onto its side and righted itself, before coming to rest up against a stone wall.

We were the first people he called -- he wanted us to get him a tow truck -- we told him to call American Automobile Association (figuring he wasn't thinking straight at that point, which he wasn't!), and after we hung up, we debated whether or not he should call the cops. In a one-vehicle accident with no injuries, that's not a requirement in this state; I thought he should, in case the insurance needed a police report, and Jim thought he shouldn't, because the cops would automatically assume he'd been drinking. Just as I called to bring all this up to Chris (thank God for cell phones!), he told us that a cop had just passed him and was turning around to come give him a hand. Well, he didn't even have to take a sobriety test, so I guess he was pretty sober!! (No guessing, actually -- I had asked him that question, and he said he'd had a couple of beers early on, but hadn't had anything to drink for about seven or eight hours. So what did he do for all that time?! This was a science-fiction fan club -- "what do you think, Mom?!" They sat around watching episodes of Firefly, the show they are all so hooked on, and reading their fan fiction to one another!!!)

So, why "Glory to God for all things"? For a number of reasons:

First, of course, is that he is completely unhurt. Spin-outs can end up anyplace, and he said he landed not two feet away from a tree.

Second, that he was smart enough to wear his seat belt. If he hadn't been, he could have been killed when that truck rolled over.

Third, that the thing righted itself. How, I still don't understand, other, of course, than the "obvious to an Orthodox Christian" explanation of his patron saint and/or guardian angel -- and considering that his patron saint is St. Christopher, who was by all accounts a pretty big bruiser of a guy, I'd say St. Christopher had a hand in that!

Fourth, that he was smart enough to stop drinking so early on. That's one thing he's always been fanatic about, drinking and driving; it stood him in good stead this time.

Fifth, that he was going under the speed limit. Considering everything that happened to that truck, the damage was surprisingly minimal; the driver's side door is a little banged up, and a small portion of the truck bed next to the door is dented, but that's all. I was describing the damage to our priest's wife the next day, and she said, "That shows he wasn't going fast." I hadn't thought of that, but it must be one of the things that convinced the cop that he really had spun out on black ice.

And sixth, that he had Amica insurance. You'll never believe this: He had just cancelled his insurance policy two weeks earlier. He'd tried to keep the policy he had in PA, but was told he'd have to cancel that policy and apply for another one, and due to his hours, he hadn't been able to apply for another one. I called Amica on Sunday morning, explained the situation to them, and asked if they couldn't extend some kind of grace period; yesterday, Chris got a call from them asking where the truck was, so an adjuster could come out and look at it. Looks like they're going to do that!!! (Everybody get Amica auto insurance!) ;-)

Well -- he's pretty glum and morose, kicking himself for not staying put in Concord overnight, for ever going in the first place, and a variety of other things. As Jim says, that truck is his pride and joy, and this first accident was probably akin to beating your horse because he doesn't go fast enough. But all things considered -- it could have been so much worse. Glory to God for all things!

The Fruits of My Labors

2007-03-23T15:07:00.000-04:00

It's been awhile since I posted about my son -- almost a month -- so I thought it was time for an update.

He and I went furniture shopping this morning. Ever since he moved to Enfield, he's been sleeping on an old futon mattress we had lying around in the cellar, on the off chance we ever had company that had to stay the night. (Very off chance.) We actually hadn't planned to wait so long on the furniture purchase, but the weather wasn't exactly conducive to shopping, so that put rather a crimp in our plans. However, today, with sunny skies and temperatures into the 40s and 50s -- 10c to 15c, for my European readers -- today we drove north to Ossipee, NH, to a place called Green Mountain Furniture. (I have yet to figure out why Green Mountain, since the Green Mountains are in Vermont, and this shop sits firmly established in the foothills of NH's own White Mountains.)

And there we found it, a replacement for the futon he had to leave behind in PA. There were, actually, quite a few futons, and I would have preferred that he buy one that was a little more expensive -- it was our housewarming gift to him -- but he really liked one that was a little less money, with a firmer mattress. (My only problem with it is that I thought the other frame was sturdier. But it's his furniture.) Now the only other thing he needs is some kind of easy chair for his living room, and he's all set for furnishings -- more or less -- I mean, that living room is really only big enough for an easy chair and a couple of tables! But a sofa-bed, an easy chair, and a few occasional tables are hardly "furniture." Frankly, it strikes me as an austere lifestyle.

But that's Chris, the original "I have all I want" man (his standard response to, "What would you like for Christmas, Sweetheart?"). Once he finds a chair he likes, he will have everything he wants: A good job, a place to sleep, a place to sit, and a place to eat, since his kitchen comes equipped with a "bar" arrangement for eating. A true minimalist, and his furniture style reflects that: Craftsman. Simple, rugged, masculine, uncomplicated.

Now (whispers Mom), if only he could find a simple, uncomplicated, outdoorsy, but totally feminine girl.... ;-)

The Book Meme

2007-03-22T22:01:00.000-04:00

I would prefer not to make such an obvious pun, but there's no way around it: I get all my memes lately from, well, Mimi. (Sorry.) Considering that my husband and I met in a library, there's no way I could resist this one.

1. Hardback or trade paperback or mass market paperback? Hardback, if I can afford it. I figure, at my age it's time I had an adult-looking library. After that, mass-market paperbacks. To me, trade paperbacks are just hardback wannabes.

2. Amazon or brick and mortar? If I could find brick and mortar locally, that would be my preference. But as it is, I actually buy most of my books through Amazon.

3. Barnes & Noble or Borders? Borders isn't anywhere close by, though my son tells me there's one near him. Yet another excuse to visit him. ;-)

4. Bookmark or dogear? I use bookmarks for where I am reading -- I was taught never to fold down the corners of pages. However, if it is my book, I will do that if I've found something I'll want to reference at a later date, or a passage that really "speaks" to me.

5. Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random? I'd prefer to catalogue them with a modified Dewey decimal system -- that's how many books we have! I really need to go through them again and come up with some sort of system for keeping them organized. I used to be so good at that, when I was younger.

6. Keep, throw away, or sell? We keep the favorites and share them back and forth (well -- I read his faves, he doesn't read mine). If I realize that the book has "outworn its welcome," I'll give it to the public library.

7. Keep dust jacket or toss it? I always keep it, having discovered from personal experience how tatty hardbacks get if you toss the jacket.

8. Read with dust jacket or remove it? I always leave it on -- the side flaps make useful bookmarks.

9. Short story or novel? Novel novel novel!! Can't STAND short stories!

10. Collection (short stories by same author) or anthology (short stories by different authors)? See previous answer.

11. Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket? Who???

12. Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks? I usually shoot for the chapter breaks, but if I'm reading at night, I'll stop when I feel myself nodding out.

13. “It was a dark and stormy night” or “Once upon a time”? Once upon a time.

14. Buy or Borrow? Buy, preferably. But only if I know I really like the author.

15. New or used? New, especially if it's a paperback.

16.Buying choice: book reviews, recommendation or browse? Come to think of it, probably browsing. One of my favorite authors was a chance pickup from a library table of new arrivals -- I saw the jacket, wondered if that was an English village I was looking at, and checked it out, and that's how I discovered Miss Read.

17. Tidy ending or cliffhanger? Tidy ending, preferably happy. That said -- one of my own books ends with a real cliffhanger (but it's resolved in the next book).

18. Morning reading, afternoon reading or nighttime reading? My very favorite time to read is at lunch. I like to take myself out to a local (and cheap) eatery with a paperback stashed in my handbag, and read and munch at the same time.

19. Stand-alone or series? Either way. I do prefer series, but if a stand-alone book is by a favorite author, I'll go for it.

20. Favorite series? Miss Read. Her books have either "Thrush Green" or "Village" in the title.

21. Favorite children’s book? Oh, another series! Graham Greene's "The Church Mice" series! The only children's books I've ever read that don't wear thin by the hundredth reading, mostly because of the clever artwork and the hilarious puns. Who could resist, "J. Dowdy, Clothiers," or "Fleece and Guyle, Solicitors"?! (Edit note: Do I feel stupid. The author of the Church Mice books was Graham OAKLEY, not Graham Greene!)

22. Favorite book of which nobody else has heard? My own?? I don't read too many books of which no one else has heard. Oh, wait a minute: There was a series by Evelyn Anthony about 20 years ago. The first title was, "The Defector," and there were three more books after that. I just recently re-read the entire series, and it was as enthralling now as it was back before the Soviet Union collapsed.

23. Favorite books read last year? The Mountain of Silence, by Kyriacos C. Markides.

24. Favorite books of all time? That's cruel. You can only list a few, and there are so, so many!
1. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
2. Father Arseny, translated by Vera Bouteneff
3. The Brother Cadfael series, by Ellis Peters
4. The Thrush Green and Village series, both by Miss Read
5. Anything by Agatha Christie

Personally, I think that was a very clever way to work in lots and lots and lots of books. ;-)

25. Least favorite book you finished last year? There wasn't really one last year, but this year, I just bought a book, "The Friday Night Knitting Club," and I'm already regretting it. Bor-ing.

26. What are you reading right now? As noted, "The Friday Night Knitting Club." "Gifts of the Desert," by Kyriacos C. Markides. "An Unorthodox Spy" and "Unorthodox Truths," by yours truly. Of course I read my own stuff!!

27. What are you reading next? Depends on where my tastes take me. I hope I will get on with my series, but who knows -- last time the desire to write hit, was 15 years ago. I thought it had disappeared forever, and suddenly, WHAM -- here I am, at it again.

Not Sure What's Going On Here, But....

2007-03-20T17:37:00.000-04:00

For those of you who depend on BlogLines to let you know when new posts are up -- I have seven posts on my Other Blog (the Book Blog). For some reason, BlogLines isn't notifying me when new posts are up, and I'm not sure why; but since I'm basically blogging an old book that was completed 15 years ago, and is the background for the book I'm currently writing, I've been posting updates to that blog nearly every day.

Does anyone know if maybe I need to change my settings so that BlogLines notifies subscribers of new posts?

Modifications

2007-03-16T19:13:00.000-04:00

Have received four very nice comments on my literary effort, An Unorthodox Spy -- and have discovered that anybody at all can read it by looking up KGB on the internet!! Don't want that. So I have taken it off public viewing, and being able to read it is now by invitation only. If you haven't received an invite, please contact me at skovranok at verizon dot net with your e-mail address, and if I know you, I'll send you an invite.

Sorry about this, but I can think of a few folks who would be most upset with me for writing the stuff I do, and I don't intend to leave myself open to hate mail. Thanks for understanding.

I Am a Snapdragon

2007-03-14T17:33:00.001-04:00

Cribbed from Mimi's blog:

I am a
Snapdragon

What Flower
Are You?

"Mischief is your middle name, but your first is friend. You are quite the prankster that loves to make other people laugh."

Hm! While I like snapdragons very much, I would never have seen myself as a prankster! However, I do love to make other people laugh. Oh, well.

It's Up

2007-03-13T16:57:00.000-04:00

/takes deep breath/ A couple of people have asked about my Other Two Books, so I looked up how to publish a novel on Blogspot, and have a new website:

www.anunorthodoxspy.blogspot.com

Not the whole thing, I just put up the Prologue and the first chapter. I'll be interested to know if people think I should keep it comin', or scrap the whole thing right now. ;-)

Possession

2007-03-10T13:43:00.000-05:00

Not demonic. I hope. This past week, I was bitten rather badly by the writing bug.

About 15 years ago, I wrote two books, back to back, about a KGB officer who became an Orthodox Christian. I haven't especially tried to market them, because I sensed that I really didn't know enough about Orthodoxy to be sure my information was accurate; and it's a good thing I kept them to myself, because as it turned out, my characters decided to take a completely different tack from what I had envisioned then, and I've had to revise both books rather extensively.

Over the past 3 or 4 years, I've been trying to write about that different tack, but something has always stopped me. I figured my muse had deserted me, and frankly, that was fine with me -- writing is a difficult business. (More later.) Then, just this past week, I got bitten again, in the form of a possible direction to go in that would clear up the cliffhanger ending I had in the second book. I knew it was right to go with this one, and since then, I've been writing at my old speed.

It isn't the writing itself that's difficult. It's the physical reaction that you have between when an idea bites, and when you can actually put pen to paper. (I still write longhand, since I can take my notebook with me anywhere.) I'm serious. I can feel my pulse pounding, my head fills up with fluid of some kind, and my nerves are strung out taut until I can start writing, getting all this stuff, whatever it is, out of my system. Then I settle down, till the next day's work.

And there's the possession factor. Your characters take you over. You cannot tell your characters what to do, what to say, or where to go. They tell you, and the infamous "writer's block" is what occurs when a writer tries to dictate to his characters. They just shut down, and leave you with the pounding pulse and the head full of fluid and the strung-out nerves, until you back down and let them tell their story. Once you have it all on paper, then you can start the revision process on the computer or the typewriter, but while the thing is in rough form, it's rough in all senses of the word.

And my writing is so dark. I don't know where that comes from, either, unless it's a perception that a world that functions around the KGB is bound to be dark, and the only thing that can bring it light is Orthodox Christianity. But I don't like the dark part.

Pray for me.

Life Begins at 27

2007-02-27T06:32:00.000-05:00

Up until yesterday, when Chris would spend weekends with us, he would sleep the last night at our house, get up at 3:30 a.m. (in military-speak, oh-too-early), and leave between 4:00 and 4:30 so he could be on the job by 7:00. Yesterday, he left at 3:30 in the afternoon, with the last of his belongings in tow. Since these did not fill up the bed of his truck, I was a little nervous about his driving along at 60 mph/100 kmph, but he assured me that he planned to take another, slower route -- turns out Route 4 stretches all the way from Dover, NH right up to Lebanon.

He called at 7:30 yesterday evening to let us know he'd made it in one piece -- took about three hours, as opposed to two -- but that included a detour to the Concord Dept. of Motor Vehicles, to see if he could get a NH license. (They were closed already. He must have gotten there five minutes too late.) He also said the road was full of "frost heaves" -- now, I've never seen frost heaves anywhere else in the country, so I'd better explain this. When the ground freezes at the start of winter, all the moisture in the earth under the road freezes, too. (Duh.) When the January Thaw comes, and all that moisture unfreezes, the roadbed temporarily swells, and the asphalt covering the road develops cracks. Now, when this happens in the spring, eventually the roadbed settles back down, the asphalt goes back down, and the cracks are repaired. But when it happens during the winter, and the roadbed re-freezes, the swellings stay in place, and you get humps in the road that are frozen into place. That is a "frost heave." And Route 4 is full of them. Must have been interesting, with his computer chair and a couple of bookcases rattling around in the back.

His computer, fortunately, was on the seat next to him, resting securely on top of the seat and on top of a duffle bag full of his clothes -- he had so many clothes that the bag came up level with the seat! And he had wrapped it in an afghan I gave him, that I had made back before I was married, so it was secure not only from falling, but from prying eyes. I was a little nervous about his driving along with a computer in the front seat; if he'd been stopped for, say, having a taillight out, a cop could have gotten mighty curious about someone from PA driving along with a computer in the front seat! (He still has his PA license and plates, a situation I hope is remedied in the coming week.) But he made it to Enfield in one piece, and had spent the hour prior to calling us moving all his stuff up the stairs to his new place.

Now all he needs is a bed to sleep on, and an easy chair or two, probably also a couple more bookcases. Being his parents' son, he has a lot of books. On the other hand, with the library two doors down, maybe he won't have to buy so many books now. In any case, his life is finally starting -- life on his own, with no encumbrances from the past, in a job he loves, in an apartment he chose, not the first one he had to grab so he could get out of a bad situation.

Many, many years, Chris!

On the Move

2007-02-25T15:13:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, we helped our son move into his new apartment.

It was a two-hour drive, one way, half of it along an interstate highway with high cross-winds, and skiers blasting past us at warp speed. We did all right until Chris pulled over -- in an area with no shelter -- and started tugging at stuff in the back of his truck. I kept waiting for him to be blown over the railing and off the side of the cliff. (I have a lurid imagination.) Turned out that the lid on one of his totes was about to blow off (how he knew that from the cab, I have no idea), and he wanted us to load it into our car. My husband persuaded him to drive up to the next exit, where we found a pull-out and completed the transfer in a lot more safety than we would have at the top of a mountain.

For that's where we were: In the mountains. Climbing steadily. I had always thought the White Mountains were just in the eastern part of the state, but nope -- they're all over the North Country. And Chris, as we found out, will be living in the middle of them. Enfield, pop. 5,000, is about halfway up one mountain, right on Lake Mascoma, which means nothing at this time of year, but I bet he'll be grateful for that proximity come next summer. And Chris's new apartment is on the second floor of a carriage house, right on Main Street. Two doors down from the library, right across the street from the police station, with a convenience market on the corner and a laundromat down the end of the block. He had a lot of conveniences in Lansdale, but Lansdale wasn't rural. This is.

It took us just half an hour to unpack most of his worldly possessions: a couple of tables, his towels, sheets and blankets, a bookcase, dishes, pots and pans, and a futon mattress that we lent him so he'd have something to sleep on. Pretty meager to start with. But the place gets wonderful sunshine and has good cross-ventilation. All his utilities are included in the rent. It's also a very masculine apartment, with a lot of wood trim and a neutral off-white paint on the walls. He says the landlord will allow him to hang "pictures" -- in Chris's case, this means icons, and he already has the perfect spot picked out for them on his bedroom wall, which is the only part of the apartment that faces east.

Before we left, I sprinkled the place with holy water. He has yet to settle into a parish, though there's one about 25 miles away, and considering that he'll probably visit us at least half the time, I'm not sure how established he will become in that parish, so I'm not sure if the priest will come out and do a house blessing this far into Lent. But that is one of his plans, once he gets a fairly stable schedule -- last week he worked nights, this week he's working days. I hope to heaven he can make that 10-mile drive up the mountain without falling asleep at the wheel on his night shifts.

Meanwhile, it's so good to see him smiling again.

Profile Pic

2007-02-22T15:29:00.001-05:00

I think I have finally managed to add a profile pic.

People who know me will say the resemblance is striking. ;-)

Meet Molly

2007-02-21T16:52:00.000-05:00

Here she is: http://www.toyota.com.matrix Just as red as in the photo. Yowza. As my sister says, "You'll certainly be visible."

Molly was an emergency purchase, when Bobo, her predecessor, blew a gasket. I'm having a hard time finding a link to Ford Escorts, but Bobo -- short for Boris the Blue Beast -- was a "French Blue" 1993 station wagon. Best car I've ever owned -- when that gasket blew, he had 208,000 miles on him, and the pickup in the engine was just phenomenal.

Anyway, you can't drive a car that keeps stalling out on you. So we went shopping, oh, about three weeks ago now, for something in our price range. We first checked out another Ford, a 2005 Focus, which would seem to be the logical descendant of the Escort -- nuh-uh. The leg room was awful, and we found ourselves sitting shoulder to shoulder. I could picture me driving around in this little puddle jumper on a typical day -- I'd go nuts inside of half an hour.

Our daughter has had a Matrix for about a year, and loves it, and I'd been thinking about it for some time, since I knew that my dream car, the Mini Cooper, was plain out of our price range. So, after we determined that the Focus was just plain cramped, we headed over to the Toyota dealership -- and there she was, the only manual transmission on the lot. A very tidy engine layout, and even at the rock-bottom price they were asking, she came with a ton of options (a/c, CD player and radio, floor mats, to name a few). We took her out for a test drive, and for me, it was love at first drive -- Jim's still warming up to her.

This is the first new car we have ever owned as a couple -- my first car was a new 1967 VW Beetle -- and also the first car of its size. We've always driven compacts before. It's so wonderful to be able to see over the top of our hedge! But even better is that, even with the increased size and the steel side-impact beams, this car still gets 30-36 mpg. I've filled the tank twice now, and I'm getting around 35 mpg, all in-town driving, and that includes letting the engine warm up on the frigid mornings we've been having.

WHOA.

In other news, Chris called yesterday -- he's signed a lease and put down a security deposit on a 1-bedroom apartment in Enfield, NH, population 5,000. It's about ten miles to his new job in White River Junction, much better than the 45-minute commute he had from Lansdale PA to New Hope, and he says the apartment is very "rustic," meaning lots of wood trim. He does need furniture, and I expect that a new futon sofa is going to be our housewarming gift to him -- he ended up leaving virtually everything in PA, when he couldn't get it into the elevator to move it (no service elevator). Oh, the best thing about this apartment? Depends -- from his point of view, it's the same price he was paying in Lansdale, and includes heat and hot water. From our point of view -- it's across the street from the police station!

The Domestic Meme

2007-02-08T05:29:00.000-05:00

Cribbed from Mimi's blog. Actually, I ended up going to the source, someone called Rosemary, because somehow Mimi lost some of the letters of the alphabet. Apparently this is supposed to be called the "Domestic Goddess" meme, but as anyone who knows me knows, I don't Do goddesses. Call it the "Domestic Domovaya" meme, a domovaya being the female of two little Russian house spirits who keep things ticking along for the family (and mess things up if they don't think the family is taking good enough care of the home!).

Aprons- Y/N- I love aprons but I don't always wear one. My favorites are "housewifey" aprons, you know, the full apron with the bib and a gathered waist and a ruffle around the bottom. Try to find one. I'm seriously considering making a couple. I used to wear them all the time, till Functional and Utilitarian came into vogue, and I wish it would go away again.

Baking-- Favorite thing to bake: Kulich, Russian Easter cake. I used to bake a lot more when the kids were home, but the hubster doesn't like baked goodies, and I'm too fat to deal with them myself. (One thing I refuse to touch, BTW, is cookies. One afternoon, about 20 years ago, I made five dozen chocolate-chip cookies, and the kids and hubster, who were watching a movie, consumed every single one. That's it! Cookies are too much d*** work to vanish in a single afternoon.)

Clothesline- Y/N Absolutely! Good for the environment, good for the wallet, clothes have a smell and feel that no fabric softener could ever give them (yes, I use that too). In the winter I dry clothes on a rack in the kitchen, which humidifies the house.

Donuts-- Have you ever made them? No. What, this New Yorker?! Doughnuts are something you buy in a bakery!

One homemaking thing you do Every day-- Well, dishes, of course. And dinner.

Freezer-- Do you have a separate deep freeze? No. When living in Europe, I got used to shopping every day, and I still do that. If we know it's going to snow, I'll pick up a few extra meals and freeze them in the refrigerator freezer, but otherwise, no, a big freezer would be a waste of money for us.

Garbage Disposal-- Y/N? Yes. When ours broke a few years back, there was no question about replacing it. I didn't grow up with one, though -- they used to be illegal in New York City, not sure why.

Handbook-- What is your favorite homemaking resource? Currently I use FlyLady, when the CHAOS gets to be too much. But my all-time favorite is a book published in the 1970s, "The Psychiatrist's Wife's Guide to Housekeeping," written with wit and a healthy dose of reality.

Ironing--Love it or hate it? I do hate it, but since the hubster has all-cotton shirts, it's a necessity -- one I have neglected far too long at this point. I'll only iron five shirts at a time, though.

Junk drawer--Y/N? Where is it? Yes, in the kitchen. How do people manage without at least one junk drawer?!

Kitchen: Design and decorating? We did this two years ago, the whole shebang -- new cabinets, new floor, new stove (natural gas!), new color scheme -- blue and white. Oddly enough, we don't spend any more time in the kitchen now than we used to, and I think it's because the room is too blue -- it gives off a very cold feeling. But I'm not sure what to do about it. Paint the blue wainscoting red??

Love: What is your favorite part of homemaking? Hanging the laundry out on the line.

Mop Y/N Not as much as I'd like. Who has the time?!

Nylons-- Wash by hand or in the washing machine? In the machine, of course. Again, who has the time to wash things by hand?!

Oven-- Do you use the window or t open the door to check? I open the door. I used to have to open the oven, when we had an oven without a window, so now I turn on my light and use the window all the time.

Pizza-- What do you put on yours? We used to get mushroom pizzas, but again, that was a kid thing, and since they've moved out, I don't think we've had pizza at all. (The original blogger, Rosemary, wrote: "My family likes it plain so we usually get plain. I like ham, bacon, black olives-- almost anything different, but my family won't go for it." It struck me how many things Mom likes go by the board for the sake of the family. You ALL know what I'm talking about!)

Quiet-- What do you do during the day when you get a quiet moment? Blog, pray, read, needlework. There are a lot more of those since the kids grew up. The hardest time of the day is around 3:00 or 3:30, when they used to come steaming in the door, and the real work of the day would begin. Dinnertime is hard, too -- as my optometrist said, "There's a voice that should be at the dinner table, and isn't."

Recipe Card Box Y/N? I have one, that I used to use a lot more often. It has all my favorite recipes from our time in Germany, and I still like them the best. Maybe I don't use it so often because I have them all memorized, after nearly 38 years???

Style of house-- Good question. It's supposed to be a "ranch," with everything on one floor, but it doesn't fit my idea of a ranch, big and sprawling. It's 950 square feet, with two bedrooms, a living room, an eat-in kitchen, and a three-season enclosed porch. I would like to call it a bungalow or a cottage, which sounds much homier. I would also, if I won the lottery, which I don't play, like to redecorate the outside in an Arts and Crafts style.

Tablecloths and napkins? When we use the kitchen table, yes. Cloth napkins, too. But again, we rarely use the kitchen table anymore -- we eat in the living room off the coffee table, listen to the radio, catch up on each other's day, and watch TV if there's anything worthwhile (our current definition of "worthwhile" is NCIS on Tuesdays and some PBS train program on Mondays -- they run a couple).

Under the kitchen sink-- organized or toxic wasteland? Pretty organized, actually, but that's because the garbage disposal takes up so much room that there isn't room for very much else. I would love to store my dishrack down there (no dishwasher), but there just isn't room for it -- so it stays in the second sink (we have a double sink, part of the kitchen upgrade).

Vacuum-- how many times per week? I blogged about this awhile back. I hate vacuuming. I hate the noise, mostly, but I also hate lugging that monster around after me. I vacuum only when I really have to, and the rest of the time, dust-mop and carpet-sweep (I need a new carpet sweeper, too). We don't have carpets, BTW, just rugs and hardwood floors.

Wash-- How many loads of laundry do you do in a week? One a day, if I keep up with it. This one's a little funny, though. As anyone with kids knows, the best description of laundry is FlyLady's "Mount Washmore," and from Kathleen Norris ("The Cloister Walk") I cribbed the story of the lady who says she's going to have engraved on her tombstone, "At last her laundry's done." I'd do it, too, if I thought my Orthodox cemetery would let me get away with it. Anyway, the week after my daughter got married, I went down to the basement laundry room to tackle the wash -- and there was nothing. One little pile of underwear, from the hubster and me. Our son had decided to start washing his own laundry, and I looked around and thought, "My life is over." It's scary how much laundry can take over your life!

(My own personal "Washer B" question: Front load or top load? We have a front load, and I love it!)

X's-- Do you keep a daily list of things to do and cross them off? When life doesn't get away from me, which, come to think of it, is the whole purpose of keeping such a list. But it's invaluable to me, in terms of keeping track of things like appointments, phone calls, and errands -- It is called a Franklin Planner.

Yard-- Who does what? My husband. Mimi and I share a lot in common, including a black thumb. Every year I buy annuals at the gardening center, and if I get around to it, I plant them -- otherwise, he does that, too, as well as tend his vegetable garden. And in the fall, if he still has productive plants, he brings them indoors and keeps them alive on the bay windowsill. One year my daughter asked us if we were growing the Little Shop of Horrors. My husband's very good with plants.

Zzz's--What is your last homemaking task for the day before going to bed? Diehes. Once the dishes are washed, the day is done, though if my husband would let me, I'd make his lunch, too. Poor soul has to get up at 3:00 a.m. and leave the house at 4:15 to catch the bus to Boston, where he works, and I just don't see that after a day like that, a man should have to make his own lunch. But he does.

A Revelation, I Think

2007-02-06T16:04:00.000-05:00

I posted this as a "meditation" (how stuffy, but I don't know what else to call it) to the OrthWomen's list yesterday. It went over well there, so I thought I'd copy it here.

Just thinking over the weekend about ourChris, and the incredible turns his life has taken: We would never have dreamed, back about 10 or 15 years ago, that his life could ever have turned out so successfully. Back in 1992, there wasn't a lot of sympathy for kids with Asperger's Syndrome, mostly because it hadn't yet been officiallyclassified as a condition, so Chris, who was then in middle school, put up with a lot of guff out of various teachers, and the indignity of being put into special-ed classes along with kids with a fraction of his intelligence - but ADD or ADHD was the only possible "code" available at the time, so we had to agree to special ed or have his teachers pick on him relentlessly. Back then, we just hoped he'd get out of high school without some kind of lasting stigma.

Back then, I actually, seriously, asked God why He had created Chris, if his only lot in life was to suffer: Hard to explain to a 10- or 15-year-old that being a "Christ-bearer," which is what "Christopher" means, is a great honor, if it means following Christ even to the carrying of an exceptionally heavy cross. True, it was right around this time that his voice developed into one of the finest basses I have ever heard, what the Russians call an"octavist," meaning he can sing somewhere in the 9th sub-basement of the musical scale. And I realized that at least one purpose of his existence was to glorify God with that voice, so that was its own kind of answer. Ijust wished that the rest of his life could be as successful, so he would at least get some sense that his life is worth living - it sure didn't seem like it, at the time.

But very recently, with the positive changes that have occurred in his life - and with the miscarriage our daughter suffered a little over a year ago - praying for that small life that was snuffed out so soon, and for its uncle, who has known pretty much nothing but sorrow and grief - recently it occurred to me: God creates a person for Himself. It isn't that He doesn't expect us to lead useful and productive lives, and He certainly gives us the means to do so - in Chris's case, parents who loved him and believed in him when no one else did - but little Sophia, who never had a chance to live this life - hey, her life is just as valuable to Him. Just because we never had a chance to know her, doesn't mean He doesn't know her and cherish her most intimately, rejoicing in her presence in His life. Just means we have to wait a bit longer to meet her.

What a mind-boggler. God creates each life for Himself, for the sheer joyof getting to know each one of us, for the sheer delight of listening to an octavist with the grimy hands of a railroad worker, or the lightning intellect and golden tongue of a great orator of the Church, or the profound reverence and love for Him of a heart that can't carry a tune in a bucket. He doesn't care about our deficiencies - those are the deficiencies of the world. We are what we are, and when we remember that He holds an icon of us in His hands - the image of what He intended when He created us - when we just make the most of how He created us, then we become what He intended,and fulfill His purpose for our lives. Does it get any better than that?

A couple of the responses on the list frankly horrified me - the things these people live with every day, that made me feel phenomenally presumptuous, posting all of this. But then I thought: Things like cerebral palsy and abuse, Parkinson's, children's cancers, all seem so outrageously cruel, and we wonder why God allows them - but they're part and parcel of being in a fallen world, just like that tsunami a couple of years ago. Our priest gave a sermon about that in which he opined that God has not finished creating the world yet, and that's why tsunamis and earthquakes happen.

Hmmm. Stands to reason, then, that He isn't finished perfecting*us,* either, and as I was just reading, when St. Paul asked for his affliction to be taken away from him - three times, yet - God's answer was,"My strength is made perfect in weakness." Oh-kay. But it's beginning to dawn on me (emphasis on "beginning") that the suffering, in whatever way, shape, or form, is part of conforming us to His image, and the scars are all part of our "icon" - maybe the physical or emotional scars wipe out or cover over the spiritual scars of our transgressions(as it says in the funeral service of the Orthodox Church). It's not my place, or anyone's, really, to try to figure it out. But it sure helps me to realize that there's a purpose for my existence beyond this time and space, and that He made me because He wanted me.

Geeeeeeeeeeezzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...!!!

I Am Still Here

2007-02-05T15:34:00.000-05:00

It's been so long since I posted that I had to verify my username and password. That'll teach me.

You can probably assess the activity in my life by the activity on my blog, which is to say, when the blog is quiet, the life is zooming off into the far reaches of the galaxy. Well -- not really. It just feels that way.

After the phone call mentioned in my last post, nine days later, my husband hopped a train down to Philadelphia and helped Chris pack up his household -- what they were able to. He ended up leaving a lot of furniture behind, the worst of which was a futon sofa that we all really liked, and which he had used for a bed while living in Lansdale (suburb of Philly). They could have packed it into the truck with no trouble, but to get it into the elevator, they would have had to dismantle it, and lacked the necessary hex keys. Since they only discovered this on Saturday morning, and Chris was due in Vermont the following Monday, they ended up leaving the futon sofa behind, along with his computer desk, an entertainment center, and a large sectional sofa that he had intended to leave behind anyway. The new tenant of the apartment paid him $300 for all of this, items which cost him $1300 originally. Ouch.

He spent the following two weeks in classes to bring him up to speed on how things are run on a big-time freight line, graduated second in his class, came home last Friday for a semi-relaxing weekend -- we spent a good part of the time trying to track down an apartment near his base of operations -- and this morning, at 4:45 (shudder), he left home for the two-hour drive to the new job in Vermont. I told him to call if he got into trouble, so since he hasn't yet called, I guess he got there all right.

The rest of the time has been divided between trying to get my father-in-law's financial affairs regularized -- dealing with privacy laws has been enlightening, to put the best face on it -- and working on a replacement for an Aran sweater I knitted my husband, oh, about 15 or so years ago. That sweater has been gradually disintegrating over the past few years, and it finally dawned on me that I was going to have to knit a replacement. Two problems: (a) I really dislike working on Arans, and (b) it takes away from cross-stitching time. I finally finished the sweater (which was supposed to be his Christmas present) last night, only to find that the sleeves are about an inch too short. If you knit, you know what that means: Snip one thread where the cuff joins the body of the sleeve, unravel it, and knit a whole new cuff. If you notice any particularly blue air, it will be from all the cussing that has swirled forth into the world from this corner of it. If there's one knitting job more tedious than Arans, it's ribbing. Knit 2, purl whatever -- I prefer one -- for however many inches you can stand, or, as knitting guru Elizabeth Zimmermann put it, "To make a turtleneck sweater, cast on the required number of stitches and knit 2, purl 2, until you are sick of it." In my case, that would make a mighty short turtleneck. I hope to heaven this dratted sweater is done tonight.

Glory to God for all things

2007-01-09T16:18:00.000-05:00

A telephone call today, while I was out for a walk. Our son Christopher left a message: He's got a new job.

:D

This particular job is in White River Junction, Vermont, which is about two hours northwest of where we live. It's the Real Deal -- not a tiny little short-line railroad, but a large corporation, RailAmerica, which owns and operates New England Central, a line that runs from the Canadian border to New London, CT. It's also one step up from his current place of employment: top speed on New Hope and Ivyland's track is 15 mph, and on the New England Central, it's 40 mph. So Chris will have good opportunity to learn and grow on this job.

I hasten to add that he did enjoy his job at New Hope very much, except for one thing: It's There, and all his friends and family are Here. When he was home for Thanksgiving, he was so bitterly homesick that it broke my heart to listen to him; but that was the visit that decided him to look for work closer to home. When he came home for Christmas, he had a job interview with New England Central on December 21. He's been on pins and needles ever since, though he said that he wouldn't have been especially sorry if the job hadn't come through; he was leaving this in the hands of the Almighty, and so have I been, asking Him to grant Chris a job "closer to Home, as Thou definest Home." (Well, on this earth, anyway -- I'm not quite ready to see my only son go HOME home.)

Yes, I'm happy about it. Not only should we be able to see him at least a little more frequently (depending on his job schedule), but also, this puts the final chapter on the Ruth Catastrophe. He can put that behind him once and for all, and move on. He still says he's not up for any more romance (and after his last experience, I can hardly blame him), but I am of the firm conviction that God created a woman for every man, and a man for every woman, so she's out there somewhere. (Monastics aren't really an exception, except that the men and women created for each other have chosen to give their lives completely to God.) The other half of my prayer is that God will bring them together, and that they will have the sense to realize it and do something about it.

I'm sure I'm not making too much sense. I'm too happy to make sense at all. CHRIS IS COMING HOME!!!!

Peculiar Me

2007-01-09T15:58:00.000-05:00

The first meme (here, anyway) of 2007. I got tagged by Philippa. Six things peculiar to me (I love Philippa's comment, "ONLY six?!" It's so apropos).

1) I really am not awfully fond of children, in general. Which does nothing to explain the fact that if I'd have my druthers, I'd have had at least six of my own. There's something about one's own offspring, who are altogether wonderful, sterling, and generally God's Gift to the Universe -- but Other People's Children aren't. Go figure.

2) I love watching Law and Order reruns. (Something Philippa and I have in common.) Also JAG reruns, and I'm not-quite-but-almost addicted to the JAG spin-off, NCIS. My favorite NCIS character is the Goth lab tekkie, Abby -- what's weird about that is that I am about as straight-up button-down as they come!

3) I love to sing Matins and Vespers. Ever since I had those music courses at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, I've been impossibly in love with singing Matins and Vespers. Mind you, I could never do this if I still had real people at home.

4) I am a certifiable Wool Snob. Wool Snobs are people who will knit with nothing else. Being a Wool Snob, I also love the critters who produce wool, namely, sheep. I'm told by local shepherds that sheep have an undeserved reputation for being stupid. They are not stupid, say the shepherds, just very, very wacky. Hmmm, I see a definite connection between me and them.

5) I always hang my laundry out of doors to dry, unless it's freezing cold. Then I hang it up indoors, on racks, to add moisture to the house. Even sheets. The worst, for me, is when it rains two weeks straight in the summer and I have to take it to the laundromat to dry it. Yecch.

6) I hate travel. Even train travel, and if I absolutely have to travel, the train is the only way to do it, in my not-so-humble opinion. But in general, I hate packing, I hate leaving my snug little haven, I hate going out into the wide world and living out of a suitcase for however long, and I even hate coming home again, because that means I've been away from home. Even going to the monastery in Jordanville, although once I'm there, it's the only place I really love besides home and my parish church. But I really dislike getting there and back, probably because we drive and I don't trust other drivers.

Whom to tag?? Philippa has already tagged Mimi, and already did this meme herself. Hmmm... Christa, Alana, and Catherine. Tag! You're it!

2006 in Review

2007-01-04T22:26:00.000-05:00

Cribbed from Mimi.

Go to the FIRST BLOG of each month for the past year.Copy-n-paste the LAST SENTENCE of each blog.That is your Year in Review.

January: Some people would just say I should be committed, period. And I'm beginning to agree.

February: At least when I die, I will lose the ability to sin. And that's a relief.

March: [Aunt Clara is] someone I keep in my prayers. She was so much more important to me than she ever knew.

April: It's in the Scottish New Testament, when Mary Magdalene sees the risen Christ and thinks He's the gardener, then realizes Who He is and reaches out for Him, and what does He say? Well, in Scots: "Quit grabbin' at me, woman!"

May: Thanks for listening.

June: So let this sum up all my days:"She lifted up her voice in praise."

July: I plan to take icons fo St. Marina and St. John of San Francisco with me. Meanwhile, prayers would be appreciated.

August: I have a dreadful suspicion that I will be fretting into eternity about great-great-great grandchildren -- or maybe I should just leave that to their great-great grandparents???

September: I think we'll stay put as long as we can. Hopefully, till it's our turn to move in with a kid. :->

October: And once everything is closed up and healed, I will be able to receive Communion again -- how I have missed that.

November: 100. Become a follower of Jesus Christ

December: 22. What do you leave for Santa? We've never done that. As a kid, I'd never heard of it.

Now, a note: This struck me as so uninspiring, as a Year in Review, that I had to keep checking the instructions at the top to make sure I was doing it correctly. Hope others have more success with this one.

It's Official:

2006-12-27T12:56:00.000-05:00

"Grumpy" really is the new baby's nickname. What's worse, it suits him. I did try to defend him, till both his parents said, "Wait till he wakes up and watch him frown." Yeah, he looks like one grumpy old baby. ;-)

In other news, our son was home for Christmas. This is not as radical as if he were living in, say, Iraq, but it was nice for us. We spent last year at his apartment in PA, and it was such a bleak Christmas, compared to this year's, spent in our own home, where he grew up. And spending Christmas in the home where he grew up, he came to a decision: He's definitely going to look for work closer to home.

I should note that we would be happier about his living in PA if he were happy about it, but since his only reason for moving there was to be closer to his girlfriend -- who promptly dumped him -- and the only reason he stayed there was because he found his dream job -- and now he's gone as far as he can on this particular railroad -- well, naturally you want to see your kid happy in life, and at the moment, he isn't. All his friends and his family are here. The job is the only thing he has there. So yes, we would like him to move closer to home so that he has a life outside of work. I will not jinx his chances by commenting on the one prospect he has, but yes, he has a prospect. (Holding my breath waiting for it to come through....)

With one foot in both Orthodox worlds -- Old Calendar and New Calendar -- I had hoped to make it to the most local Old-Calendar parish, 50 miles away, for "Russian Christmas," as we used to call it when I was growing up. Yesterday our daughter informed us that January 7th will probably be "Grumpy's" christening day. The things we give up for our families....

The Year You Turned 18 Music Meme

2006-12-20T21:28:00.000-05:00

Cribbed from Mimi's site: Go to popculturemadness.com and select the year you turned 18. Paste the list of the top 75 songs. (I could only find 40.) Bold the ones you liked; strike the ones you disliked; and italicize the ones you know but don’t exactly like or dislike. The ones you don’t know will stay plain text.

1964 Greatest Hits (am I dating myself, or what?!)

1. Twist and Shout - Beatles
2. Under The Boardwalk - The Drifters
3. I Saw Her Standing There - Beatles
~~4. Dancing In The Street - Martha and the Vandellas~~
5. You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling - Righteous Brothers
~~6. I Get Around - Beach Boys~~
7. I Want To Hold Your Hand - Beatles
8. Where Did Our Love Go - Supremes
9. My Guy - Mary Wells1
~~10. Chapel Of Love - Dixie Cups~~
11. L.O.V.E. - Nat "King" Cole
12. (Just Like) Romeo and Juliet - Reflections
13. Fun, Fun, Fun - Beach Boys
14. Dawn (Go Away) - Four Seasons
~~15. Do Wah Diddy Diddy - Manfred Mann~~
16. I'm Into Something Good - Herman's Hermits
17. Oh, Pretty Woman - Roy Orbison
18. Baby Love - Supremes
19. Time Is On My Side - Rolling Stones
20. She Loves You - Beatles
21. No Particular Place To Go - Chuck Berry
22. California Sun - Rivieras
23. You Really Got Me - the Kinks
24. The Way You Do The Things You Do - Temptations
25. Come See About Me - the Supremes
26. G.T.O. - Ronny & the Daytonas
27. You Don't Own Me - Leslie Gore
28. Last Kiss - J. Frank Wilson & the Cavaliers
29. Rag Doll - Four Seasons
30. Baby I Need Your Loving - Four Tops
31. Memphis - Johnny Rivers
32. The Girl From Ipanema - Stan Getz & Astrud Gilberto
33. Viva Las Vegas - Elvis Presley
34. Bits and Pieces - Dave Clark Five
35. Harlem Shuffle - Bob & Earl
36. Everybody Loves Somebody - Dean Martin
37. You Never Can Tell - Chuck Berry
38. The House Of The Rising Sun - the Animals
39. All My Loving - the Beatles
40. The Leader Of The Pack - Shangri-las

Knit Two, Purl -- Well, One, Actually

2006-12-16T11:37:00.000-05:00

While ds was home for Thanksgiving, we asked him for his Christmas list. Now, this is the same kid whose dearest wish, at age two, was "butter bears" -- a particular kind of cookie, and that was all he wanted for Christmas! He's always been that kind of minimalist. And this year is no exception. What he wants, more than anything, is a pair of hand-knit socks.

It has been years since I made socks. I haven't forgotten how, but the thing about socks is, once you make one, you have to make another one. Two isn't optional. So sock-knitting gets really old, really fast, and I've been buying socks for at least 15 years. (I do buy good-quality socks.) But what mom can resist the heartfelt plea of her offspring, especially one whose usual Christmas list consists of, "I have everything I want"? I got out the needles, and went shopping for Ragg wool, a particularly thick and warm wool that makes wonderful socks.

Obviously, I had left it too late in the season, and all that was left was a sock wool, dress-weight, made of half wool and half -- are you ready for this? -- bamboo. How do you make yarn out of a tree?!?!?! And I cast on 84 stitches, having measured the circumference of the leg in question (12") and the length from heel to the ball of the foot (8" -- the ball of the foot is where you start the toe decrease).

One of the really real down sides of hand-knit socks, and Ragg socks in particular, is that you have to rib the whole dratted leg. With dress socks, you can liven it up a bit, and I have three books of the most wonderful German socks with clocks and cables and little windowpane-style decorations to make the heart beat faster (and the work more interesting); but Ragg socks are work socks, and made with marled wool, so there's only one option: ribbing. Ribbing does have the advantage of elasticizing the garment, particularly desirable in socks, but the question is, what kind of ribbing is most elastic?

Elizabeth Zimmermann, the late knitting guru, thought that the ultimate in elasticity was knit 2, purl 2. Her daughter, Meg Swansen, maintained that knit 1 purl 1 was more elastic, and that was also my experience, till I once had to cast on an odd number of stitches and found that the only way to rib it effectively was -- knit 2, purl 1. Now, that is elastic. The single purl stitch pulls the two knitted stitches in so tightly that you wouldn't know there was a stitch in between them, yet the garment itself is not tight; it has a wonderful give. These days, I do all my ribbing in knit 2, purl 1; the other thing I like about it is its trinitarian aspect. When even your clothes have the Trinity as their foundation, the rest of you is more inclined that way, too.

So! 84 stitches, cast onto four double-pointed needles of 21 stitches each, ribbed in knit 2, purl 1. (You knit with a fifth needle -- this is German-style knitting, and that fifth needle gives you a truly circular shape, as opposed to the English/American knitting off a triangle of three needles with a fourth.) I spent an entire week trying to make that dratted bamboo yarn work, before putting it down and telling myself, "I'll get to it Eventually." My jaw would clench every time I picked it up to knit.

Chris telephoned last night, and I had to tell him that he probably wasn't going to get his socks in time for Christmas. The disappointment in his voice was so painful that after I hung up, I decided I had to try again. Then it dawned on me: The whole trouble was that bamboo yarn. I don't know why, but it just doesn't feel right in my fingers. So I ripped out the whole inch I'd succeeded in gritting my way through, scavenged in my wool box for some other sock yarn, and had my second brain wave: Put the two together. Came back out, combined the stupid bamboo yarn with some honest sheep's-wool yarn, and cast the 84 stitches back on.

I already have an inch and a half. He probably still won't get his socks in time for Christmas, but at that rate, there's at least a possibility he'll take them home with him when he goes back again after spending his Christmas break at home. Feels good!

Christmas Meme

2006-12-11T22:20:00.000-05:00

Cribbed from Mimi's blog:

1. Egg nog or hot chocolate? It'd be eggnog, if we weren't fasting and all the store eggnog (which is pasteurized) is gone by Christmas Day.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree? Oh, they get wrapped, of course!

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white? We've had both. Currently it's colored lights. The first time I saw white lights was in Germany in 1968, and I thought they were so boring. Now I really like them.

4. Do you hang mistletoe? No.

5. When do you put your decorations up? The day before St. Nicholas, December 5 -- that way, he knows ours is a Christmas house and he can visit it. ;-) We leave them up till "Russian Christmas," as we used to call January 7 in New York.

6. What is your favorite holiday dish (excluding dessert)? Babka. You can have it both Christmas and Easter.

7. Favorite holiday memory as a child: Probably the year I turned 15, my first ever Midnight Mass, and my first ever glass of wine. I was sitting on the sofa admiring the Christmas tree through a mildly alcoholic haze when my mother gasped and said, "Oh, I forgot all about your birthday!" And I said, "Oh! Yeah! I did too!" (It's December 24.)

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? My mother told me on my 7th birthday. She said she was afraid I'd hear about it at school.

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? Didn't used to as a kid, but now we do.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree? With a variety of Christmas ornaments, colored lights, and "garlic" (garland). I like the white garland best, because if you get just the right kind, it really looks like snow.

11. Snow! Love it or dread it? Both, actually. I love the way it looks on the trees, especially the wet, "floompy" snow. But I hate shovelling it!

12. Can you ice skate? No, and I wish I could!

13. Do you remember your favorite gift? Probably my piano. It's as old as my son.

14. What's the most important thing about the holidays for you? The birth of our Lord, of course.

15. What is your favorite holiday dessert? German stollen! Buttery, nutty, smothered in powdered sugar -- sheer heaven.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition? My stepfather is Polish, and on Christmas Eve, we all break a piece of oplatki, a thin wafer like a Catholic Communion wafer. Each person gets a piece, and then you share it with everyone around the table and wish each other a blessed Christmas. You never eat your own oplatek, but it's supposed to be gone by the time you leave the house.

17. What tops your tree? An angel, who invariable lurches to one side or the other. We've decided she's on a permanent bender.

18. Which do you prefer, giving or receiving? Giving, actually. I can never wait to see people's faces as they open their gifts.

19. What is your favorite Christmas song? Nothing that anyone would recognize who wasn't Orthodox! It's "Today the Virgin gives birth in a cave." There's something about "He Whom the heavens cannot contain is contained in a womb" that blows my mind every year. But if I have to give a more commonly known Christmas carol, it'd be "Carol of the Bells," hands down.

20. Candy canes: We never have them, but I like the idea of them.

21. Favorite Christmas movie? "It's a Wonderful Life" and "A Christmas Carol" -- Alastair Sim version only -- are tied for first place.

22. What do you leave for Santa? We've never done that. As a kid, I'd never heard of it.

"Grumpy"

2006-11-24T18:48:00.000-05:00

I met my new grandson today. He was born on Monday of this week, and one of the many, many things I'm thankful for is that he didn't choose the middle of Thanksgiving dinner to make his entrance. I'm told, by his father, that my daughter went into labor at 1:30 a.m. Monday morning, and gave birth in the back of an ambulance at 2:00 a.m, right outside Westbrook High School, on the way to the hospital in Portland (ME). "So what goes on his birth certificate?" I asked. "Westbrook, or 'the back of Fire and Rescue Ambulance #1'?" (Portland -- the hospital of record.)

He is a pretty placid kid, in that at four days old, he does nothing but sleep and eat. The only time he makes his discomfort known is when they are changing him -- apparently, he hates to be cold, and face it, a wet diaper is pretty cold, till you get a nice dry one on (especially in Maine in November). However, when he is awake, he seems to do a lot of frowning and making little squeaks and grunts that indicate he's trying to decide whether to make a Statement about current conditions.

My daughter blogs about both writing (her profession) and family life. Her oldest son has been dubbed "Hamlet," for reasons of privacy, and also, as she said, because "his tantrums are positively Shakespearean." We've recently been trying to decide on names for Son #2. Banquo? MacDuff? Jaques, from "As You Like It"? Today, the baby's father grinned and said, "I think we should just call him Grumpy." I have a horrible feeling that it will stick.

Welcome to your weird family, Grumpy! ;-)

One. Word.

2006-11-24T18:05:00.000-05:00

Cribbed from Philippa:

One word, and only one word, so here goes!

Yourself: musical
Your partner: loyal
Your hair: red(dish)
Your Mother: Catholic
Your Father: dead
Your Favorite Item: wool
Your dream last night: none
Your Favorite Drink: cawfy! (That's "coffee" in Brooklynese)
Your Dream Car: Mini
Your Dream Home: cottage
The Room You Are In: office
Your Ex: none
Your fear: heights
Where you Want to be in Ten Years? here
Who you hung out with last night: family :D
What You're Not: organized
Muffins: corn
One of Your Wish List Items: floorstand
Time: whazzat?
The Last Thing You Did: shopped
What You Are Wearing: conservative
Your favorite weather: rain
Your Favorite Book: Horologion
Last thing you ate: muffin
Your Life: full
Your mood: peaceful
Your Best Friends: phenomenal!
What are you thinking about right now: husband
Your car: blue
What are you doing at the moment: blogging
Your summer: yecch!
Relationship status: married
What is on your tv: music
What is the weather like: cold
When is the last time you laughed: yesterday

Sundowning

2006-11-15T14:44:00.000-05:00

That's what dear old's condition is called.

I went to the rehab center to see him, and on my way to his room stopped at the nurses' station to talk to someone. Yesterday when I was there, one of the nurses had asked me if he had ever seemed "confused" to us while he lived with us, and I said, "Not that I can recall." Today, of course, I said, "We had evidence of that last night." She nodded and said, "Good, I'm glad it wasn't just me," and went on to explain that dear old has had Jekyll-and-Hyde episodes: "One minute he's a very sweet old man, the next he's confused, and a little while later he's downright nasty." Yep!

"Ask him," she said, "if he remembers calling you last night. I bet he doesn't." And sure enough, he didn't! Apparently very old people get this thing called "sundowning," where they get phenomenally confused about everything in life once the sun goes down; and while the sun is up, they are their normal, rational selves. I'd heard of this, but hadn't realized it was kicking in with dear old.

Now I'm glad I kept my patience, and kept my visit with him friendly. Glory to God for granting me that patience, and the visit with the nurse beforehand; but these doctors, who keep insisting that living into your nineties is a good thing....!!!!!

When I got home, I called dh at work and told him the nurse said not to bother visiting his father, because dear old won't remember it. Dh was shocked, to say the least, but yeah, that's consistent with sundowning, too. Oh, and it's exacerbated by alcohol -- the smile on her face when I told her about the phone call, and his "tippling" habits (I wish it were only tippling!) was priceless. I feel bad for dh, but at least we know dear old really isn't playing with a full deck.

Brought Up on Charges

2006-11-15T04:05:00.000-05:00

At least, that's what Dear Old Dad is threatening to do to dh and me. Why? Because his son didn't visit him last night.

The day after my last post, we went to church. Now, dear old, being 94, doesn't see the need to go to church anymore, since he went for the first 90 years of his life (doesn't seem to have done much good), so he was planning to stay home. Well, since he can't stay home by himself, we got someone in from a local organization to stay with him. He was NOT happy. Didn't see why he couldn't stay by himself. (Possibly because on Saturday evening, he got panicky when dh was working in the cellar and I was working in the office, and he thought we had left him alone???)

So the next day, after we get back from church, dear old decides to take himself for a walk. The conversation went like this: "I WANNA GO FOR A WALK!" "OK, let me get the cars washed and I'll take you." "I WANNA GO BY MYSELF!" "OK, but just stay in the driveway." So dh helps dear old down the steps -- he can't get down steps by himself -- comes back into the house to get a pail of water to wash the cars, and by the time he's back outside, dear old is halfway down the block.

Well, you know the rest. He turned to come back, and on his way back, fell. It was plain he couldn't move his left leg, so we called the EMTs, and they came and assessed him. He about had them convinced it was just sciatica when they asked him if he could stand ono the leg, and he said No; so they took him to the emergency room, where, you guessed it, an x-ray showed he had broken a hip.

He spent all last week in the hospital, and dh worked from home half days so he could concentrate on getting dear old's finances in order, in case we needed to pay for any of his care (also so that we could afford assisted living for him!). The last couple of days, dear old was getting quite cantankerous about being there; he'd had enough, and wanted to come home. Instead, he went to a rehab facility on Sunday.

We visited him there both Sunday and Monday, but yesterday dh went back to work in Boston, and I went to the rehab facility by myself to see the social worker in charge of dear old's case -- there were a couple of things I thought she should know about his condition, among them the fact that we were considering assisted living once he's out of rehab. When she heard what dh's ghastly hours were, she said he shouldn't bother coming to visit his father on the days when he works in Boston, since dear old has plenty of company and is quite wiped out by his physical therapy. (We could see that!)

So last night, at 9:00 p.m., we're getting ready for bed and the phone rings. It's dear old, threatening to swear out an arrest warrant on us for "abandonment." Let's see, dh gets home at 7:00 p.m., still has to have his dinner and wind down from the day, but is that a good enough reason to just stay home and RELAX?!?!?! Evidently not! I plan to take myself off to the rehab center today, tell one of the nurses, or maybe the social worker, about this latest development, and see if they will support my telling off dear old, in no uncertain terms.

It feels lousy to do such a thing. He's old. He's alone. We're his only family, besides his grandkids. ("And whose fault's that?" whispers my baser self.) But I'm sorry -- when you live with other people, consideration all around is pretty basic, even at 94.

(An amusing aside: At one point, a Catholic priest came to visit dear old in the hospital. He supported dear old's decision not to attend Mass anymore. This past Sunday, meanwhile, my Orthodox priest gave a sermon: "Whether you're 16 or 86 -- or 96 -- you still have to struggle. The spiritual struggle is part of our salvation." Right now, I'm struggling not to wring dear old's neck!)

When I'm 94

2006-11-04T08:14:00.000-05:00

The Beatles had a great tune called, "When I'm 64," to which I can't remember all the lyrics, mostly because the year it came out, I was occupied with wedding preparations, and 64 seemed like the back side of the moon. Now that it's imminent, well....

Dear old Dad has been with us for two weeks now, and this morning was about typical: DH is making coffee and we're chatting quietly when suddenly we hear a roar: "I NEED A SHOWER!" This is supposed to be the signal for DH to drop everything and going rushing in to help his father, not the easiest thing in the world when you are making brewed coffee and in the middle of counting out the appropriate number of scoops. "JUST A MINUTE," yells back DH. (We have to yell because dear old is deaf, and won't wear a hearing aid.) "HELP ME WITH THE SHOWER!" "IN A MINUTE!" Coffee counted out, DH runs to the bathroom to help dear old into the shower, explain to him -- yet again -- how to turn on the hot and cold water, and where the grab bar is.

Then breakfast. He shuffles out, clean and spruce, sits down, and starts worrying about mail that came for him yesterday. Now, at the same time, he also wants his juice, his oatmeal, his bread and peanut butter, and his coffee, in that order -- but he wants us to see to his bills, too. Right now. The Boss (me) steps in: "JIM IS MAKING BREAKFAST. WE WILL WORRY ABOUT BILLS AFTER BREAKFAST." "OK," he mutters, and subsides.

We are hoping to take him with us later today while we shop for a new sofa. My brother has offered to take our old sofa for his son, newly graduated from college and in need of "real" furniture, and we had decided, while I was convalescing, to get a new sofa; dear old's arrival put a crimp in those plans, but since my brother is coming to collect our sofa on Thursday or Friday, we kind of need something to put in its place. So shopping with dear old in tow is something of a necessity, since we both need to be comfortable with this thing.

We are also hoping to hold off putting dear old into assisted living till sometime after Christmas. It doesn't seem fair to move him up here and toss him into a home just before the holidays. But if we ever doubted it before, today's episode has made it crystal clear that he really needs assisted living; I don't have the physical strength to deal with his frailties, and DH can't be home all the time.

And meanwhile, we are hoping that we can survive dear old's arrival into our household. He really is as demanding as a three-year-old, and as needy as a three-year-old, but without the resources to entertain himself for any length of time. Yesterday he was complaining to DH that he needs to get out more often. (He was upset that I wouldn't take him grocery shopping with me.) But when they went for a walk, 2/10 of a mile down to the post office, DH found that he had to hold the old man up on the way back. I can picture me struggling with groceries, a cart, and holding up at 94-year-old grown man who's taller than me.

Anyway, assuming we survive this Presence in our household -- not all caregivers do -- we have also begun to take steps towards getting long-term care insurance. I hope never to need it; but if I do, I don't want to do this to my children. Neither, bless him, does DH.

Things I've Done...

2006-11-02T12:19:00.000-05:00

...are in bold face type. Swiped this from Philippa. I hate swiping stuff, but when it's this good, how can I resist?

What have you done? Or not, as the case may be?
01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink
02. Swam with wild dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain (if you count the gondola car to the top of the Zugspitze....)
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula.
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said “I love you’ and meant it!
09. Hugged a tree
10. Bungee jumped
11. Visited Paris
12. Watched a lightning storm at sea
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
14. Seen the Northern Lights
15. Gone to a huge sports game
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
18. Touched an iceberg
19. Slept under the stars
20. Changed a baby’s nappy
21. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
22. Watched a meteor shower
23. Drunk champagne
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
27. Had a food fight
28. Bet on a winning horse.
29. Asked out a stranger
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
32. Held a lamb
33. Seen a total eclipse
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Scored a winning goal
36. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
39. Visited all 5 continents
40. Taken care of someone who was drunk
41. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country
42. Watched wild whales
43. Stolen a sign
44. Backpacked 4
5. Taken a road-trip
46. Gone rock climbing
48. Midnight walk on the beach
49. Gone sky diving
50. Taken a train through Europe
51. Been heartbroken longer than you were actually in love
52. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table, and had a meal with them
53. Milked a cow
54. Alphabetized your CDs
55. Sung karaoke
56. Lounged around in bed all day
57. Gone scuba diving
58. Kissed in the rain
59. Gone to a drive-in theatre
60. Started a business
61. Taken a martial arts class
62. Been in a movie (not to my knowledge, but having worked in NYC, it's possible I was in one a hundred years ago without knowing it....)
63. Crashed a party
64. Gone without food for 5 days
65. Gotten a tattoo
66. Got flowers for no reason
67. Performed on stage
68. Been to Las Vegas
69. Recorded music
70. Eaten shark
71. Buried one/both of your parents.
72. Been on a cruise ship
73. Spoken more than one language fluently
74. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
75. Walked a famous bridge
76. Had plastic surgery
77. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived
78. Wrote articles for a large publication.
77. Tried to lose weight seriously
79. Piloted an airplane
80. Petted a stingray.
81. Broken someone’s heart
82. Broken a bone
83. Eaten sushi
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Parasailed
86. Skipped all your school reunions (not, I hasten to add, by choice -- they all took place around family events)
87. Shaved your head
88. Caused a car accident
89. Pretended to be “sick” (who's pretending? I call it "sick and tired leave")
90. Swam in the Pacific Ocean
91. Saved someone’s life.
92. Fainted
93. Been in the room while someone is giving birth
94. Hitchhiked
95. Adopted a child
96. Been caught daydreaming
97. Been to the Painted Desert
98. Called off a wedding engagement
99. Donated your blood
100. Become a follower of Jesus Christ

Senescence. Oy.

2006-10-23T17:54:00.000-04:00

Some time ago, I blogged about the possibility of having my father-in-law moving in with us. Well, it's happened. Last week, he nearly fell while grocery shopping, and he sounded so panicky that my husband -- his only child -- went racing down to NJ on Thursday and brought his dad back on Saturday -- just packed a few clothes, two (!) radios, and two large boxes of oatmeal (at FIL's insistence, of course -- like we didn't know what oatmeal was in the Wilds of NH), and up they came.

People have been trying to make out like we're saints or something for having him here. WE AREN'T. There simply is no other choice. He's 94, blind and deaf, and he shouldn't have been living on his own as long as he has. But it wasn't till June that he consented to move in with us, and of course after that, we had our own difficulties.

It's already looking like we will have to consider assisted living for him, mostly because my husband finds he can't sleep at night -- keeps waiting for his dad to get up out of bed and fall to the floor. Then there is the drinking. Apparently my FIL is accustomed to downing half a pint of scotch every evening. Half a pint, in case you missed this in arithmetic class the way I did, is an entire cup of scotch. Not at one sitting, mind. He has 3 oz. for his first drink, 3 oz. for his second drink, and the remaining 2 oz. as an after-dinner "aperitif," as he describes it. My husband and I just looked at each other, as the pint-size bottle he brought with him got lower and lower. I'm wondering what he will say when he finds that the bottle of scotch he thought came up with him, was never packed.

I hate to ask for yet more prayers, but they would be appreciated.

I'm Done. :D

2006-10-17T16:36:00.000-04:00

Today was a "killer" day for appointments -- three on the same day -- but here are the results:

1. Wound Clinic, 8:45 a.m. I am done with this. Discharged. The doctor started to scrape at the scab covering the incision and said, "There's no point my trying to do anything with this. It's healed." Checked the two drain sites and said, "That's skin growing in there." Was it just five weeks ago that we all thought this would take until Christmas?!

2. Infectious Disease doctor, 12:30 p.m. "You look so much better than the first time I saw you. As long as you're not having any fever from the removal of the drains, I don't need to see you again."

3. Coumadin Clinic, 3:00 p.m. (theoretically -- I didn't get in till after 3:30). No change in the dosage, and apparently, the blood clot I got from the PICC line will dissolve itself over a period of about 3-6 months. Once my clotting level stabilizes, these appointments will gradually decrease from weekly to monthly.

Oh, and the best part: I get to take a shower again. If you hear a faint rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus clear the other side of the country, around 6:00 p.m., that'll be me.

I GOT MY LIFE BACK!!!!!

Ahhhhh.

2006-10-12T16:51:00.000-04:00

OK, picture this: You start out with a lengthy tube that is inserted into your abdomen somewhere in the region of your navel. A few weeks later, feeling as if you are at death's door, you find out that you have not one, but two abscesses, one each side of your abdomen, that need to be drained of the fluid in them because it contains a potentially lethal infection, so two more tubes are inserted into these, attached to plastic drainage-collection bags that have to be emptied every four hours or so. Now you have three tubes sticking out of your abdomen.

As of today, all three tubes are gone. The center one was removed about three weeks ago -- or was it only two? Seems to me it was three, but I know I haven't been sleeping in a bed that long -- when the incision became so small that there was nothing left for the wound vac to suck off. That is continuing to shrink, and I will know its status when I return to the wound clinic next Tuesday. The two side tubes came out today.

Relief is spelled "Ahhhhh." I'm trying to imagine what it will be like to lie down to sleep, something I've only been able to do in the past ten days, with no tubes to be careful of. I have yet to conceive of actually being able to take a shower, instead of a sink bath -- that won't happen till all the holes are closed over, and that will be at least another week.

But oh my gosh, THE END IS IN SIGHT. There is light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not an oncoming train. Time for a prolonged happy dance!

Well, Shut My Mouth and Call Me -- Something

2006-10-03T16:28:00.000-04:00

After a day of doctors’ appointments, I have to share this:

1) The incision that opened up after surgery is finally closing up. I am off the wound vac, and the depth has gone from 4 cm to 0.3 cm! And the length has gone from 8 cm to 5.2 cm (that’s 5” to something like 3”).

2) Also saw the infectious disease control doc this afternoon, who says that I may have to take antibiotics for just one more week, and no more than two – the MRSA I was hospitalized for in September appears to be dead. All my most recent blood work is in the normal range, except for my albumin count (protein) – she says I need more protein. Since I’ve been consuming hardly anything but, that was almost laughable. So I guess I’m not giving up my breakfast eggs any time soon.

I am absolutely floored. Was it three or four weeks ago that the wound-care doctor said healing would take a lot longer than originally projected, and now -- he says it will be completely healed in 2-3 weeks, which is pretty darn close to his original projection. The drains that I have in place to drain off the two abscesses are a little dicier, at least till I have another CAT scan, but the last CAT scan looked pretty good, so I'm hopeful the next one, later this week, will show that both abscesses have collapsed, and that will mean they can take these drains out at last. You have no idea how "interesting" life can be when you have three lengthy tubes coming out of your abdomen....

Now, if I can just start going to church again! I've only been once in the last two months. But I'm hoping to go again this coming Sunday. And once everything is closed up and healed, I will be able to receive Communion again -- how I have missed that.

xx Years Ago I....

2006-10-02T05:06:00.000-04:00

Cribbed this from Philippa's blog http://philippaalan.blogspot.com.

25 years Ago I...
- Was 34
- was living in Waltham, MA
- had a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old
- experienced my first real New England autumn

20 years Ago I...
- Was 39
- was working at Harvard University
- together with my husband, bought our first (and to date only) house
- moved to NH

15 Years Ago I...
- Was 44
- became Orthodox
- watched the fall of communism in the Soviet Union with a feeling of utter disbelief
- worked for an educational assessment firm

10 Years Ago I...
- Was 49
- was attending college, at long last, to become an accountant
- was stunned to learn that my mother-in-law had died suddenly
- was thanking God that 1995 was over

5 Years Ago I...
- Was 54
- was struggling with depression
- was dealing with the loss of my mother, the transfer of my spiritual father, and the marriage of my daughter
- was fired for the first time in my life -- from a volunteer job!

4 years ago I...
- Was 55
- rediscovered cross stitch
- finally figured out the sequence of Matins and Vespers
- broke my wrist in a fall down a flight of stairs, and had it healed by the Kursk Root Icon of the Theotokos

2 Years Ago I...
- Was 57
- lost my son when he moved to PA
- went to Jordanville for the last time (there's always next year!)
- had the kitchen updated and renovated, at long last

1 Year Ago I...
- Was 58
- took the train to PA to visit my son
- started a cross-stitch piece as a gift for him, a steam train rolling through the mountains at evening
- finally realized that it was OK to power down on activities -- I've earned my retirement!

Yesterday I...
- read Matins at home
- finished the last of seven books lent to me by our priest's wife
- listened to the rain
- cooked my first meal in two months (dh has been cooking since my surgery)

Today I...
- hope to get back into cross stitch
- plan to wash towels
- need to find something else to read
- gear myself up for marathon doctors' appointments all week

Tomorrow I...
- visit the Wound Care Center w/r/t the healing of my incision
- visit the Infectious Disease Control doc to see what's up with MRSA
- get ready to visit a doctor I no longer have any confidence in (on Wednesday)
- try to remember that at some point, all this will end

Tag: To anyone who wants to pick it up.

Mrs. A., I Presume?

2006-09-24T07:23:00.000-04:00

Uh, not exactly. More like MRSA, which stands for something along the lines of methicillen-resistant stapholococcus something-or-other. It is a particularly nasty staph infection, highly resistant to all the usual antibiotics, and it lurks in, of all places, hospitals. And it is what I have been coping with ever since September 6th.

Yes, I am just back (actually got home two days ago) from yet another hospital stay, this one rather longer than the first. A nurse friend of mine maintains that if I'd been kept longer the first time, the hospital may have caught this thing, but I don't see how, since it only just surfaced a month after the hysterectomy. The Infectious Disease Control doc maintains that the germs implanted themselves in my body during the surgery (leading me to wonder about asepsis at this hospital!!!), and have been quietly growing colonies ever since. Be that as it may, when I went into chills and fever on September6th, my husband took me to the Emergency Room, I had a CT scan at midnight (talk about an ungodly hour!!!), and was admitted early the morning of the 7th. The CT scan showed two abscesses in my belly. Those have been draining ever since the 7th, though I think they are beginning to peter out, and once they do, at least those two holes can be closed off.

Wait, it gets better. Because IVs can't be left in place for more than a couple of days, and I would be in the hospital for 10-14 days, they inserted a PICC line into my right arm, which is basically a very long IV that goes right up through your vein. (Yes, they use a mild anesthesia, thank goodness.) Four days after inserting it, they did an ultrasound to make sure that all was well with the PICC line, and -- it wasn't. I'd developed a blood clot.

I'm telling you, between staph infections and procedures that create more problems than they solve, hospitals are dangerous places. Now I am on two more medications: Bactrim, the one oral antibiotic that can overcome MRSA (the other antibiotic, vancomycin, is given intravenously), and Coumadin, a blood thinner that is supposed to keep the clot from getting any bigger. My question: Why don't they just bust up the clot?! Doctors make no sense whatever.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas...

2006-09-05T17:32:00.000-04:00

...before I will ever see the back of this affair. After the latest examination, the wound-care specialist said, "What was my original estimate? 4-6 weeks? I probably shouldn't have said that." "Meaning," I said, "it'll take longer." "It'll take longer."

Actually, it's beginning to look a lot like never at this point. I think I will just give up hope of ever having a normal life again -- that's the safest route. Well, I see the oncologist this Friday for the final (presumably) exam, and we'll see what he has to say about anything. With my luck, he'll recommend a few rounds of chemo just to add to the overall misery. Why not?

Meanwhile, I've come up with a scenario for my little sucky buddy, though it only works if you're into sci-fi, as I discovered when I pulled it on the nurse today, and she had no idea what I was talking about. I decided -- this all comes from the appearance of my navel, with this big black THING sucked into it -- that the "vac" is actually a tricorder that is recording all kinds of information about me, and when I plug the vac/tricorder into the wall outlet ostensibly to charge the battery, it starts relaying the info back to the Mother Ship. These particular aliens aren't into anal probes, but prefer navel probes -- one thing to be thankful for, at least.

Hey, I need some kind of self-generated insanity to keep me sane.

Moving Right Along, or In, or....

2006-09-04T07:05:00.000-04:00

An anonymous poster to my blog asked about the reasons for my father-in-law's moving in with us, whether for health reasons or practical. The short answer is, yes. ;-)

It's a little of both. He's 94 years old, for one thing, with macular degeneration and substantial hearing loss, and he should not have been living on his own all these years (ten, since my mother-in-law's death). Try to convince him of that, however, and it was only this past June that my husband got his father to agree to move up with us. Sure, he lives in a retirement community, and sure, the ideal thing would be for him to live in his own place and us nearby. But we don't live nearby, and are not about to move down to NJ, and -- well, he really shouldn't be on his own.

A funny aside to all this: Just before my surgery, I got a frantic phone call from an old family friend, landing on us about how he shouldn't be alone and what were we thinking, not having him with us, etc. etc. When I could get a word in edgewise, I explained that his moving in with us had been in the works, till my own health became an issue, and that it would be back in the works as soon as I was recovered. Oh. Then the Old Family Friend explains that she has been Talking with my FIL's next-door neighbor, and I see what's really going on: The next-door neighbor is the one he depends on for rides to church and to the doctor's, and she's getting sick and tired of carting him around! And well she should, but this has been his "escape route" for not having to move!!

It gets better. Last week he mentioned to the Next-Door Neighbor that he would be moving up to NH before the end of the year. By the next day, he had offers for his house from all over Leisure Village (the retirement community)! At least we know it will sell easily....

Sometimes I think about moving to a retirement community. My in-laws were younger than we are now, when they did that. It was just the thing for my MIL, lots of Activities, and not having to take care of their property but still owning the roof over their heads; bus access to church and shopping; opportunities for travel, which incidentally my FIL hated. But then I think about being with a lot of other geezers, and being pressured to Take Part in All the Activities, and would we have bus access to stores and church -- plus, I would hate to be a part of the trend up here, which is the ruination of Maine by people moving up from Massachusetts.... And then there are all the people we know here, and we know all the short-cuts around heavy traffic....

I think we'll stay put as long as we can. Hopefully, till it's our turn to move in with a kid. :->

It Sucks, It Really Does

2006-08-29T14:32:00.000-04:00

I'm referring, of course, to my wound vac, "vac" being short for Vacuum-Assisted Closure. I got hooked up today. It looks like I have the navel of a space alien, with this big black blob (that's the sponge) compressed by the "negative pressure" (read vacuum) over my more normal human navel. A tube leads out of that and into a canister, and through vacuum pressure the drainage that is keeping the wound from closing is sucked out and deposited in the canister, which is changed when it's full and disposed of as medical waste. At the same time, the vacuum sucks up healthy cells from elsewhere in the body and deposits them into the wound cavity, which speeds up healing (by how much, I'm not entirely sure. Weeks, anyway).

The rest of the machine consists of a large battery pack that has to be charged up twelve hours out of 24, which leaves me with quite a bit of freedom, providing you don't mind toting the battery-pack-cum-canister everywhere you go. I'm most concerned, at this point, with how to manage the drainage tube when I settle down for the night, since I'm still sleeping in a recliner, and I don't want the tubing to get caught up in any of the chair mechanisms -- if it does, I run the risk of breaking the vacuum seal, and I don't want to do that because I'm not sure, yet, how to fix it.

It's not particularly painful, thank goodness, just a definite sense of pressure in the area of my navel, but I guess I'll get used to that. Nor is it especially noisy, which was one of my concerns; however, the noise it does make resembles nothing so much as, well, a quick fart. Do I really want to tote this thing into church with me??? ;-)

The alien-navel sponge gets changed three times a week; the canister is changed whenever it's full of drainage (they think that might happen once a week, with my wound); the whole healing process is supposed to take two months tops, which is just about the time I should be completely healed from the hysterectomy, or, as I've taken to calling it, the "hystericalectomy," because it just gets weirder and weirder. And once the procedure is complete, and I can confidently expect to resume what passes for my own life:

MY FATHER-IN-LAW WILL MOVE IN WITH US!!! Ain't life FUN!!!

My Life is a Soap Opera

2006-08-22T17:35:00.000-04:00

In the ongoing saga of post-surgical sub-existence, my mind is still boggling. I'm beginning to wonder if this will be its permanent state.

Today was supposed to be the day when I got hooked up to my vacuum cleaner. The doctor comes in (not, thank goodness, the same as my surgeon), takes a look, and shakes his head. Apparently there are two little tunnels, one at either end of the wound, and they are still draining, and he can't get them in contact with the dressing that covers the wound and creates the vacuum that sucks all the bad stuff out and pulls up all the good stuff. He says either they need to close -- by next week -- or he will need to open the wound further to expose the tunnels so they can come into contact with the dressing. Can this get any more complicated, d'ya think?!

I met with my gynecologist today, and needless to say, it was not the happiest moment of the day for either of us. She wanted to undo the dressing that the Wound Care Center had just put on, and yes, she knew I had been there, and I wouldn't let her; her dressings are nowhere near as thorough as theirs are. Finally I just walked out. She also tried to tell me that the wound would not have closed over in any case, and yeah, that's possible, since I'm not the skinniest woman around. But I would like to have the feeling that my doctor had done everything possible to see this surgery through to an uneventful conclusion, and that's not how I feel; and then to have my feelings discounted - well, now I'm not sure if I should even go back at all, and if so, when. (I should add that the post-surgical exam will be done by the surgeon of record, a gynecological oncologist; the woman in question is my gynecologist.)

Most disturbing in all of this is my poor husband, who thought he would be running the household for maybe 4-6 weeks, till I got on my feet, and now there's no end in sight for him; and he's still trying to hold down his day job, working half-days from home and spending the other half on the household stuff. At work, they keep bugging him for updates, and he's in no position to give them, because I'm in no position to give them; this is almost a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants situation. So anyone who has any spare prayers lying around, please send them our way; my husband's name is Jim. Thanks.

Incredibly, Hope

2006-08-15T17:47:00.000-04:00

I don't know if I mentioned in yesterday's blog that I had an appointment at a Wound Care Center in the next town over, people whose job is (in my not-so-humble opinion) cleaning up after other doctors' messes. Actually, they deal with severe wounds that just won't close.

I was sitting at the table, trying to force down a soft-boiled egg, when one of the visiting nurses showed up to change my dressing, despite my having told everybody and his uncle from day one that my dressing wouldn't have to be changed today, since that would be done at the Wound Care Center. My husband went outside to try to chase her off -- we get billed by the visit, and our insurance will only cover 25 visits per year -- while I attended to various personal chores. When I came out, she was standing in the kitchen, talking to my husband. Sigh.

And for some reason -- I found out later that she and dh had discussed this outside -- she mentioned that in a circumstance like this, the body takes a terrific hit. Dealing with the emotional trauma takes all the body's reserves, but after surgery and then a complication, there are no more reserves.

Do you know how incredibly helpful it is to hear someone say this?! That that awful helpless feeling of not being able to cope with even life simplest tasks is physiological?! I can't describe the lift I got from hearing it put that way. No "Stop feeling sorry for yourself," no "It'll be fine, you'll see," none of that phenomenally brainless optimism that leaves you feeling as if you have to Get Into the Spirit of the Thing, rah rah!! Just, "This is how it is, and it takes time to get off Point A, let alone actually making it to Point B."

I kept this in mind all day, and had proof of it later in the day, when I went to make a medication log in my planner, just something that would help me keep track of how much of what I had had -- I wrote it out for today, then what I'd had for breakfast and lunch, and I was absolutely exhausted. How can you get wiped from making a list?!

Oh, yeah, the Wound Care Center. Apparently they have this vacuum thing that sucks up healthy cells from other parts of the body and deposits them in the cavity of the wound. I asked for a worst-case scenario, since I can't function with Optimistic Prognostications, and was told, "Worst case? Two months."

Two months?! I was sure I was looking at 6-8 months!! Of course, I'll be hooked up to "Ginny" 24/7 for those two months, but hey, it beats 8 months. ("Ginny": wound vac = WV = West Virginia = Ginny. I need to do at least one weird thing per day to stay on keel.)

Setback :-(

2006-08-14T18:21:00.000-04:00

Well -- I survived, as most of you know by now. The surgery actually went very well (I'm told), and I came home last Monday, slept for half the week, and was all set to move on to recuperation.

Yeah, right.

On Friday, I went to my gynecologist's office to have the stitches taken out, something they used to do in the hospital back when I was having kids. And back then, the stitches were in for 8-9 days, and those puppies HELD. Not this time, they didn't. So now I'm walking around with a 5" slit in my gut, which needs to be dressed twice a day by Visiting Nurses (and our insurance will only pay for 25 visits).

To top it all off -- my doctor is on vacation. I really liked this doctor, and I can't get over the fact that she scheduled someone for major surgery the week before she went on vacation. And I can't get past wondering if she wasn't in such a big honking rush to get the stitches out so she could go on vacation -- and now I have to live with the consequences of her being in such a rush.

Honestly, if I had known? I don't know if I would have gone through with it, I just don't know. But what I do know is that my life is now what I swore it would never be: I have no life. It's taken up by medical procedures and consults and pills, 24/7. And this is what it will be, now that I've chosen this semi-"life" instead of letting nature take its course: As you age, you become more and more of an income for the Medical Establishment.

70 is a good age. 80 can be a good age. 90? I have people in my family in their 90s. 90 is not a good age. Nor do I want to do that to my kids ("When the heck is the old bat finally gonna give in?!"). No one in his 60s should have a living parent.

I can only hope now that God takes me before then. Now that I've chosen "life."