welcome to my yard show

He Should Have Been Knitting

2012-02-03T11:00:00.000-08:00

If Mr. Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier), the debonaire married man in this 1952 movie version of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, had spent his time knitting instead of chasing after Sister Carrie, he would not have ended up like this (see below).

Yes, that is poor Hurstwood, transformed within a few years time into a beggar on the Bowery. And it gets even worse for Hurstwood.

You can find out how much worse by doing what I've been doing for weeks now. Knitting! In January, I discovered the joys of knitting while listening to Sister Carrie on Librivox.org. Librivox provides free audio recordings of books in the public domain like Sister Carrie. All of the books are read by volunteers.

After I spent over 16 hours with Sister Carrie, I moved on to George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss. As the picture below reveals, The Mill on the Floss provides its share of high drama, too, during the more than 21 hours of the unabridged audio version of the book.

What my life has lacked in drama, it has made up for in knitting accomplished. Look at what I've knitted!

Foot stool cover

Part of a mohair triangular neck shawl

Part way through second sock of pair

Socks for son Adam's birthday

lamp shade cover

Part of spiral rug (many chapters listened to with this!)

Thank you, Theodore Dreiser! Thank you, George Eliot! Thank you, Librivox!

What Would Jane Austen Knit?

2012-01-16T08:11:00.004-08:00

In December I wrote about the trials of being a homebody without a hearth. Now, in January, I can happily report that this homebody now has a hearth. Everyone who sees the fireplace and mantel agrees that it looks like it belongs here. And now, whenever anyone calls, their first question is, "Are you sitting by the fire?" Often the answer is yes. The fireplace experience is now almost complete with the addition of a CD with the sounds of a burning fire.

Sometimes I feel guilty about the virtual aspect of my hearth. Real as it looks, it's a fake fire, although I can make heat come out of the vent at the top of the fireplace by pushing a button. Convincing as the fireplace sounds are, they come from a CD player hiding behind the chair. And there's no fire smell, although someone suggested I might be able to find a candle with a fireplace scent.

But when I start feeling guilty about the faux aspect of my fireplace, I remind myself that a faux fireplace is the only kind I'll ever have at this house. I begin to feel like a character in a Barbara Pym novel, enjoying the fire when the "evenings draw in." The fire, which in Barbara Pym's books are usually gas fires, are the most agreeable aspects of winter for her heroines, who like me, are often homebodies.

In her first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, she wrote, "Her passion had mellowed into a comfortable feeling more like the coziness of a winter evening by the fire than the uncertain rapture of a spring morning."

To give myself an excuse to spend even more time by the fire, I began to knit a rug. It is almost finished now.

And here are some more views of the rug in progress.

This is the striped rug from Be Happy Knits, designed by Blythe Edmondson. She calls it a kitchen rug, but I call it a hearthrug.

The great writer, Jane Austen, was also accomplished at needlework (see below).

I'm sure that Jane Austen would approve of my days and evenings by the hearth.

Bike Ride Through Winter/Spring/Summer

2012-01-12T04:40:00.003-08:00

When I started out on my bike ride yesterday, it was definitely winter time. I cautiously approached this section of the trail behind Wilson College. Not far from here, a few years ago, I went into a skid on icy ground and the next thing I knew I was sitting on the ground wondering why in the world I was sitting on the ground. I couldn't even remember what day it was.

But on my most recent bike ride, I didn't have to deal with winter time very long. Less than two miles away, at Michael's crafts store, springtime had already arrived.

Inside the store, though, Valentine's Day hadn't yet given up its hold.

But in the very next aisle, I was engulfed in the pastel world of Easter.

No wonder I was thoroughly confused by the time I came out of Michael's. Stopping at a discount store didn't help either. When I arrived across town at that store, I discovered that it was even later than I thought.

Stacks of potting soil had replaced the bags of ice melt. I guess if you want to buy something to throw on the icy sidewalk, you'll have to use potting soil.

And inside the store, the time acceleration drama continued. Remember summers when you were a kid and collected lightning bugs in a Mason jar? At this store they were selling LED "fireflies" in jars as well as "butterflies" in jars. Rush to Big Lots now to get your fireflies and butterflies. They'll be gone long before summertime.

I was surprised as well as discouraged lately to learn that almost everyone in my book club had already finished reading all the books we selected for this year. I thought I was doing well to have already finished the book for February. But after my bicycle ride through winter/spring/summer, I understand that they are not reading ahead after all. They're just keeping up with the times.

Homebody Seeking Hearth

2011-12-17T08:52:00.000-08:00

I've always been a homebody. As a thirteen year old I dreaded my best friend's invitations to spend the night at her house. I have a vivid memory of mornings on the way to high school. Every day, we passed a house where I could see right into the den. Each day I caught a brief glimpse of a color TV, tuned to the Today Show. How I wanted to be that person, free to lie on the sofa and watch the Today Show in peace rather than being forced to enter the teenaged ghetto of high school. Most of all I dreaded traveling with the high school band. One year I had the good fortune to have a cold before the most dreaded trip of all, the all-day torture of marching in the Shrine Bowl Parade and playing in the half-time show. I celebrated my reprieve by lying on the sofa and watching Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, secure in the knowledge that I did not have to get up early and board the bus for the Shrine Bowl the next day.

Recognize the girl above? This famous homebody is Beth in the book, Little Women. Although the March family was painfully poor, Beth had everything a homebody could want -- yarn, a kitten, a piano, and a fireplace.

The two pictures above remind me of what I miss most in my homebody existence-- a fireplace. The houses I grew up in both had fireplaces, but never since then have I lived in a house with a fireplace. The closest I've come is the woodstove my husband installed in our cabin, but unfortunately, we can't go there in the winter months when a confirmed homebody most wants to sit by the fire.

What I yearn for even more than the fire itself is a mantel. I even found a term to describe my condition of yearning-- "mantel envy." An Internet article described what to do if you find yourself with a serious case of mantel envy. Don't have a mantel? No problem. The article provides a guide to those unfortunate souls without mantels: "How To Fake It If You Don't Have One."

And faking it was my only option, I knew that. So I turned to the article entitled "How To Build a Faux Fireplace from a Mirror Frame." There I learned that for only $100 and a weekend of work I could build my own faux fireplace.

Wow! Wouldn't that make a great winter project, though, even as I drooled over this particular faux fireplace, I knew in my heart that I was more likely to be capable of creating a fireplace like the one below.

Will this be the winter I finally create the hearth every homebody yearns for?

Celebrating WHAT?

2011-12-10T07:13:00.000-08:00

As I walked along the street where I live last Wednesday morning, I passed by dozens of newspapers in transparent orange covers. They were copies of the free local Advertiser paper, copies that had been left to soak up the cold rain. I was startled by the headline I kept reading as I walked the five blocks west from my house. CELEBRATING MISSILES!

Celebrating what? How could anyone celebrate missiles? The headline seemed especially out of place during this Advent Season, the time when most people in town are celebrating the coming of the Prince of Peace.

I finally gave in to curiosity and picked up a clearly abandoned copy of the a paper. Then I took it with me to Bible Study class, where I received some odd looks as I took the dripping paper out of the plastic bag.

"What's that?" someone asked.

"I want to copy down this weird headline. Celebrating Missiles." No one else seemed to think that the headline was worthy of comment or even a raised eyebrow. Celebrating Missiles, so what?

I read below the headline and discovered that Letterkenny Army Depot recently celebrated receiving a contract for the production of Patriot Missile Launchers. This was good news because it meant JOBS.

It's hard to argue with celebrating new jobs. But I couldn't help feeling sad that there was such a disconnect between jobs as a source of livelihood and missiles as a source of death. The county where I live has almost two hundred church congregations, yet do any of us even notice what a huge gap there is between what Jesus teaches and what we celebrate as good news for our economy? This sort of thing passes without any comment as far as I know. Yet there's an advent wreath of candles in the middle of the table where we have Bible Study, and one of the candles is the candle of peace.

Occupy Christmas

2011-12-04T06:30:00.001-08:00

I knew there had to be an Occupy Christmas. So when I googled the term, I wasn't surprised to come up with a list of 28,200,000 results. For me, the term, Occupy Christmas means that I would occupy the holiday with something other than a spending frenzy. It was only the first of December, and I had already listened to far too many stories about waiting three hours in line at Wal-Mart to buy an X-box or heading out at 3 AM on Black Friday to save money on a flat screen TV.

So I began my occupation of Christmas and encouraged my husband to join me. "Look," I said, "instead of buying Kaylin one of those licensed trademark toys, let's make her something." I showed him the something I had in mind. I had seen it on the Internet-- a puppet theatre to hang in a doorway.

"I can knit the puppets if you can sew the puppet theatre," I told him.

He liked the idea. A few days later, he showed me the fabric he had chosen for the puppet theatre. It was a shiny purple satiny material.

"Won't that be hard to sew?" I asked.

"I don't see why it would," he said.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, in my limited store of knowledge from junior high Home Ec class days, was planted the idea that materials like satin were hard to sew, but since I don't really know how to sew and he does, I didn't say any more.

Last Friday I came home and heard the sewing machine whirring upstairs. I went to the doorway of the room where Jeff was working on the puppet theatre. I caught a glimpse of a piece of purple satin sliding to the floor.

"Just stay away!" he growled.

In that moment I experienced the primary danger of Occupy Christmas. I witnessed the truth that lies behind each gift under the tree. THE AGONY OF CREATION.

I went downstairs and entered into my own version of Occupy Christmas, but I was in even worse shape than Jeff. At least, he was suffering during the creation of a Christmas present. I was still working on a birthday present, and this present was a pair of socks for a birthday party the very next day. I couldn't even begin to truly Occupy Christmas until I got those socks knitted. Fortunately, they were for a size 10 toddler foot. Unfortunately, I had already had to rip out one pair and start near the beginning again. Little did I know that I was about to have to rip the second pair back to the beginning and start all over again. All this would have to be accomplished before I could even think about Occupying Christmas.

Take a good look at this adorable sock for a child. This is the sock I did not make. I did not even count this sock into my suffering because I never got past the heel on this sock. One of my worst character traits is that I never read directions all the way through. You'd think I would learn. How many times do I have to get toward the end of preparing a recipe only to find out that I don't have white wine for the white bean soup and that the red wine I used just turned the beans and the potatoes in the soup a disgusting shade of gray? How many times do I have to start a knitting project only to encounter a mile high brick wall in the form of a knitting maneuver I have no idea how to perform. In this case, that knitting maneuver was called WRAP AND TURN. After a few minutes of trying to follow the directions for the WRAP AND TURN, I had a wad of yarn where the heel should have been, and I was moments away from doing the WRAP part of the WRAP AND TURN around my neck. This catastrophe sent me back to the computer for a pattern that didn't require me to learn any new knitting skills because I had reached a point where I was beyond the reach of any teachable moments.

This story has something of a happy ending. I finished the purple birthday socks literally in the knick of time, ten minutes before I was to leave for the birthday party.

Jeff eventually stopped growling "Stay away!" and came downstairs with the finished puppet theatre. He gave me a long report of all the roadblocks and detours not to mention wrecks he'd encountered on the way to Occupying Christmas. But the puppet theatre was beautiful.

So now there is only one problem. No puppets! I've finished the socks, and now I can start knitting puppets. But there's a small hitch in my plans. My son whispered to me the other day that it would be really nice if I made Christmas stockings for both of their kids. And he meant Christmas 2011. Christmas stockings and puppets, too? Does he have any idea how much time it takes to knit Christmas stockings?

No, of course he doesn't. That's why Occupy Christmas is not likely to be nearly as crowded this Christmas as Wal-Mart is. But it's a much better place to be.

Where All the Electrical Outlets Are

2011-10-18T06:07:00.000-07:00

“I like to play indoors better ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”

5th grader quoted by Richard Louv in Orion Magazine, March/April 2007

Driving home from Garden City Beach, SC last week, I again took up my search for children playing outside. It was a beautiful October Saturday. We traveled 400 miles that day, and although I saw lots of outdoor play equipment in the yards we passed, I never saw a single child playing outside. In fact, I didn't see anybody outside in a single one of the yards we passed. The next day, which was equally beautiful, we drove the rest of the way home, 160 miles from Staunton, VA to our house. I finally managed to see one person outside in his yard. This was a man on a riding lawn mower.

I can only suppose that most kids outdoors on those two beautiful days were off somewhere participating in organized activities such as soccer or football games. I also saw signs for pumpkin festivals and corn mazes. But all of those are organized activities, and most of them cost money. I felt like a real old-timer as I lamented the loss of unorganized outdoor activities that hadn't been turned into commodities.

A friend of mine who has three young sons told me that they have never wanted to play outside. They have a big yard in a safe, quiet neighborhood, but they have always preferred the TV and the computer. They will only go outside if forced to do so.

According to Richard Louv's Orion Magazine article, "Leave No Child Inside," children who hate playing outside are the norm these days.

In a typical week, only 6 percent of children ages nine to thirteen play outside on their own. Studies by the National Sporting Goods Association and by American Sports Data, a research firm, show a dramatic decline in the past decade in such outdoor activities as swimming and fishing. Even bike riding is down 31 percent since 1995. In San Diego, according to a survey by the nonprofit Aquatic Adventures, 90 percent of inner-city kids do not know how to swim; 34 percent have never been to the beach. In suburban Fort Collins, Colorado, teachers shake their heads in dismay when they describe the many students who have never been to the mountains visible year-round on the western horizon.

When we got home on Sunday, we walked up to the neighborhood pizza place. On the way there, we had to dodge three pre-teen boys riding up the sidewalk on their bicycles.

I was glad to see them.

The Continuing Saga of DIY

2011-10-03T05:38:00.000-07:00

The heavy rains of the past few weeks have taken a toll on the enclosed back porch, where the washer and dryer are. I can't even begin to envision how to do this myself.

But first, I will be on vacation for the next two weeks. Maybe I will return renewed and confident and ready to face even the most daunting home repairs.

My Granny Clampett Laundry Detergent

2011-10-01T09:59:00.009-07:00

I felt just like Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies. Remember how she used to take her black cast iron pot out beside the ce-ment pond to make lye soap? She didn't trust the soap they sold in Beverly Hills.

Granny was a millionaire, or at least she was the mother-in-law of a millionaire, but she had grown up poor and thrifty and she wasn't about to adopt the spendthrift ways of Beverly Hills.

I'm far from a millionaire, and I'm always looking for new ways to be thrifty. So when I came upon a website with a list of homemade cleaning products, I immediately bookmarked it and went in search of the ingredients. According to the website, I would be able to make 10 gallons of liquid laundry detergent for only $2. I wasn't even sure how much liquid laundry detergent costs, but I knew it was a lot more than that.

Unfortunately, most of the ingredients for homemade liquid laundry detergent were not in the local supermarket. The only one I found was baking soda. The other three ingredients were borax, a bar of laundry soap, and washing soda. I decided to leave out the slightly toxic borax (it always reminded me of Ronald Reagan's 20 Mule Team Borax commercials anyway).

Here he's advertising Borateem. Anybody know the difference between Borax and Borateem?

Dial states that Borateem is a "color-safe dry bleach." According to www.pesticideinfo.org, Borateem is 98.7 percent borax but also includes tribromsalan, a microbiocide, and sodium dodecylbenzene sulfonate, an insecticide. Borax does not contain other ingredients

After giving up on Borax, I went on line and ordered Arm & Hammer Washing Soda and a bar of Fels-Naphtha Laundry Soap. These sat around the house for a month, until my Dorian Gray Bathroom was completed and I was got the nerve to follow the directions. Something about the idea of shaving a bar of soap into water and cooking it on the stove made me nervous. I imagined the pot becoming permanently flavored with Fels-Naphtha Laundry Soap. I imagined bubbles coming out of our mouths after we ate soup from the pot I had used to make my laundry detergent.

Finally, I took the bold step. I grated the Fels-Naptha soap into the pot, cooked it until dissolved, and added it with the baking soda and washing soda to a large amount of water in a bucket. At this point I realized that I had 3-gallon buckets, not the 5- gallon buckets the recipe called for. I gave up any notion of accuracy. It was beyond my math ability to calculate how to alter the proportions to make them suitable for 3- gallon buckets instead of 5- gallon buckets. I think I did manage to come up with the fraction 3/5 and attempt some sort of multiplication, but in the end all this arithmetic was making me so anxious that I decided to just dump in as much water as looked right. Then, I followed the directions by covering the bucket and leaving it overnight.

The next morning, I half-expected to find that the mixture had come alive, like something in an old horror movie.

The mixture had definitely changed. It had the consistency of Jello that's not quite congealed. I followed the instructions to break up the gelled chunks. I added water, lots of water, so that instead of one full bucket of laundry detergent, I now had two. Then, I discovered that I had found a new way to paint myself in a corner. I hadn't set aside enough containers for this monstrous amount of homemade laundry detergent. I did have a large plastic container that had previously held cat litter. But that didn't even begin to hold all the detergent. I found a partly-filled gallon of vinegar, poured the vinegar into a Mason jar, and used the gallon plastic jug for most of the leftover laundry detergent. But what to do with the rest?

I quickly rounded up some dirty clothes and used a paper cup to scoop the newly created laundry detergent into the washer. Was I using too much? Was I about to have a Lucy Ricardo moment with suds spilling all over the floor?

But no, I must have done something right. The washer didn't overflow. The clothes looked and smelled normal. Were they clean? As clean as any clothes I wash usually get.

Granny Clampett would be proud of me.

My Dorian Gray Bathroom

2011-09-24T04:28:00.000-07:00

This was me about three weeks ago. See the desperation in my eyes? It was at this very moment that I dangerously decided to follow the lead of Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray and sell my soul.

Realizing that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian (whimsically) expresses a desire to sell his soul to ensure the portrait Basil has painted would age rather than himself. Dorian's wish is fulfilled, plunging him into debauched acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging.^[3]

Knowing how The Picture of Dorian Gray ended, I made a somewhat different deal. "Let me age instead of my bathroom!" I cried.

The upstairs hallway became a reflection of my soul.

My bathroom has grown better-looking, but this is what I look like as the end of my DIY project nears.

Yes, I have taken on all the characteristics that the bathroom formerly possessed.

But I really did get a better-looking bathroom!

The newly-grouted floor after a day on my knees.

The new bathroom has butterflies in its soul.

Potluck in Pennsylvania

2011-09-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

"Do you want to go to the Organists' Guild potluck supper on Saturday night?" my husband asked me.

I do now, but I won't when Saturday comes." This was nothing new. However, there was a new wrinkle to my reluctance to go to a covered dish supper in a church fellowship hall. "I won't be able to eat anything there," I added. Central Pennsylvania Church Potluck suppers are not what you would call vegan-friendly.

"Was there anything at the church picnic last week that I could have eaten?" I asked. I don't go to church picnics anymore.

My husband thought for a few seconds. "The grape salad. Maybe the grape salad. I don't know what was in that. It's some sort of fad. Two people brought the same grape salad to the church picnic."

I googled "grape salad" and discovered that it was made with a container of sour cream, eight ounces of cream cheese, and two cups of brown sugar. No, it didn't qualify as vegan friendly either, but then most church potluck salads don't. I remember a long-ago favorite of mine, the seven-layer salad. Some of the layers were mayonnaise, hard boiled eggs, cheese, and bacon. I think there was one layer of lettuce down in the bottom somewhere.

The time for the potluck supper arrived and we got at the back of the serving line. I had already explained to our friend the organist about my vegan diet, trying not to be tedious about it. This particular potluck dinner featured two buckets of fried chicken as the main event. I wouldn't be reaching in those buckets.

First we came to a broccoli salad. "I think this has bacon in it," my friend said as if he were conducting a tour. "You might want to stay away from it."

Next came the potatoes with ham, the deviled eggs, the potato chips, the creamed corn, the macaroni salad, the potato salad, the macaroni and cheese, and the baked beans (with bacon).

"Here!" my friend said, rooting around in a plastic dish of pasta salad. "This looks relatively pure."

"It is," I said. "I brought that."

"Take a lot of it," he said. "I don't want you to starve."

There was plenty to take, even though we were at the end of the line. Most of the people were by-passing my pasta salad or just taking a teaspoon full. Even though it was colorful and appealing (to my eyes), they didn't seem to agree. Or maybe it's more that it was something they just couldn't put a name to, and that bothered them. I've had this experience at church Halloween parties. Since I came as something other than a witch, a pirate, a hobo or a horror movie monster, I made people uneasy. "What are you supposed to be?" they said the year I came carrying a sword and holding a bloody papier mache head.

"I'm Judith holding the cut off head of Holofernes."

Maybe you can understand why they were a little taken aback, although Judith and Holofernes are Biblical, and this was a church Halloween party. If I had come as Jason from Friday the 13th, nobody would have thought that was weird at all.

The same principle was in operation at this potluck supper. I had brought what I thought was reasonably acceptable food, yet there seemed to be something unnamable about it. "What are those things?" my friend asked, pointing to one of the ingredients of my pasta salad.

"Black beans," I said. The salad also contained multi-grain rotini, red bell pepper,carrots, green peas, tomatoes, zucchini and McCutcheon's Vidalia Honey Mustard dressing.

Next came the desserts. "You can't eat any of these!" my friend wailed. "Being a vegan is impossible."

He was more upset about it than I was. I had come knowing what to expect. I wasn't really worried that I would break down and start pigging out on all the forbidden foods. My worry was that I would turn sullen because I would feel excluded from all the pleasure others were having eating the fried chicken and the deviled eggs and the shoofly pie and the brownies.

Already I'm envisioning a time when things will be different. More and more people seem interested in changing to a healthier style of eating. On September 29th there will be an all plant-based meal following the talk on heart-healthy eating by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn at the Mercersburg Academy.

I'll be able to eat everything on the table.

My vision of the future: vegan potluck

Depart Wildly

2011-09-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

"I make a plan for every day I live. I've got certain things I want to do that day, and if I didn't, I suppose I wouldn't do anything. But I can't help but notice, and I've been noticing for a good many years now, that my plans almost never work out. The day almost never exactly fits the plan. Some days depart wildly from the plan. So I conclude that even though you're going to make plans, if you're a live human being, one of the things you must learn to do is to take them lightly."

Wendell Berry to Jordan Fisher-Smith in interview

I remembered that quote from Wendell Berry this morning. I had a plan for the day-- ride my bike to the store early, then spend the rest of the day working on the continuing saga of the bathroom painting. By eight-thirty the day had begun to "depart wildly" in Wendell Berry's term.

Wild Departure # 1.

It was hard to take lightly a third flat tire! One thing it did help me notice-- the mile-and-a-half that flew by when I was on my bicycle dragged on and on when I was on foot heading home.

I'm getting tired of this view:

Wild Departure # 2. Instead of being at the store, I'm sitting at the computer ordering a new bicycle tire. Flat number 3 was the breaking point. No more buying inner tubes to go in this same tire, only to have it repeatedly go flat.

Wild Departure # 3. Take the the other bicycle off the bike trainer and get it ready to ride on the road. For a person of normal manual ability, this would be a small task. For someone like me, it's like trying to do brain surgery after studying Brain Surgery for Dummies for five minutes.

By the time I've ridden bike # 2 to the store, stopping every few hundred yards to make sure the back wheel is not about to fall off, then returned home, I'm hours behind schedule. I begin work on the bathroom. Today's first job is to put a second coat of polyurethane on the walls above the shower.

Two days ago I spent an entire morning applying blue tissue paper to the wall above the shower. When finished, it's supposed to make you feel as if you're submerged in warm, tropical waters. We'll see!

Now, it's a new day. Today my plan is to ride my bike to Bender's Potato Barn and see what local vegetables are still available. I also plan to stop by the library and get a book called THE NOT SO BIG HOUSE. Then, I will paint the white wainscoting in the bathroom.

At least, that is my plan. Time will tell whether this will be another day of departing wildly.

DIY Overdose

2011-09-09T04:54:00.003-07:00

As Week 3 of my DIY bathroom painting project continues, I'm beginning to develop the symptoms of DIY overdose. Every time I close my eyes I see myself as Lucy Ricardo mired in one of her haywire schemes. My house wishes it looked as organized as the Ricardo's apartment in the scene above. My body wishes I would wear clothes as chic as those Lucy (left) models in this scene.

There is one blessing in all this. I didn't try to hang wallpaper. We all know how that would have turned out.

I am making progress on the bathroom project. But who would have thought it would take so long to patch, sand, and paint such a small room?

Part of the problem was I got sidetracked by another DIY project.

Never believe anyone who tells you that fixing a flat bicycle tire is easy. It is only easy for elite male bicyclists and twelve-year-old boys. They can do it in about a minute, even if changing the flat involves the daunting task of dealing with the derailleur on the back tire. My grease-smeared Terry Bicycle Manual, written for women, comes closer to the truth: "The rear wheel is ornery because you have to contend with the chain and the rear derailleur... Reassembly can be a breeze or a bear." The latter part of that quote I would revise to "Reassembly will be a bear."

Imagine how proud I felt of myself after spending an hour changing the tire. Yes, I survived. I now had two hands totally covered with black grease, but my bicycle was ready to roll. There was a knock at my door. The Nobel Award people were here to award me a Nobel Prize in bicycle tire changing. I glowed with pride.

You know what it says in the Bible or somewhere: "Pride goeth before a fall." No, I didn't fall, but my tire went flat the next day. The Nobel Prize people called in a judge to revoke my award.

As my penalty, I was sentenced to serve a sentence in DIY Bicycle Repair Hell. I shot the photo below during my incarceration.

The writer of Psalm 88 thought he knew something about lamentations.

⁶ You have put me in the lowest pit,
in the darkest depths.

I would update that Psalm: "You have put me in the lowest DIY bicycle repair shop, you have placed flat tire after flat tire before me and turned my hands black..."

Yes, like a good DIY Psalmist I cried out for help with my plight.

What happened wasn't nearly this music video-esque. But at least I'm back riding my bicycle again.

High Maintenance Woman

2011-08-31T05:34:00.002-07:00

About ten years ago, my husband and I were in a restaurant with our younger son, who was always searching for a girlfriend. Our waitress was a girl he knew from high school.

"That's a cute girl," I said when she left to fill our orders.

My son frowned. "She's high maintenance."

"I'm high maintenance, too," I said.

"Mom!" Both my son and my husband laughed.

Now, years later, I realize that I truly have become high maintenance. Only I'm the one doing the maintenance. The operative words in my life all have to do with what needs high maintenance: cracked, sagging, broken, old.

At my bedside there are three products directly relating to my high maintenance life.

#1 Mary Kay TimeWise Body Lotion. "Helps Reduce the Visible Signs of Aging."

# 2. HeelTastic Intensive Heel Therapy. "Watch dry, cracked heels disappear." (Ta da! No heels!)

#3. Dermasil Dry Skin Treatment. "Suitable for severe dry skin, and control of symptoms such as chapping, cracking, flaking..."

As if it weren't enough that I have to deal with all these visible signs of aging in myself, lately I have begun dealing with the visible signs of aging in our house, which is about 45 years older than I am.

I had been noticing and mostly ignoring these visible signs of aging in the house for years. But last week, looking up at the bathroom ceiling, I could no longer deny that it had all the symptoms of severe dry skin, especially the cracking and flaking. That was the moment I transformed myself from docile sit-at-the-computer writer into HIGH MAINTENANCE WOMAN, a super-hero capable of tackling any high maintenance chore our old house could set before me.

First, I changed into my HIGH MAINTENANCE WOMAN super-hero costume, (1) a pair of black capri pants that have become so baggy I can now conveniently slip them on and off without unzipping them (2) an equally baggy old tee shirt. Then, I donned my HIGH MAINTENANCE WOMAN superhero disguise, a gauze mask and a pair of nerdy-looking safety glasses.

Am I wearing this mask upside down?

My first idea was a simple one-- patch and paint the bathroom ceiling. But that was before HIGH MAINTENANCE WOMAN shifted into overdrive. "Yes, you will paint the ceiling," she said. "That will make a good start." Before I knew what had hit me, HIGH MAINTENANCE WOMAN had scraped and patched. In a flash, she applied two coats of Zinnser mold-resistant paint to the bathroom ceiling. HIGH MAINTENANCE WOMAN could not be stopped. "Now, the walls," she said. "This wallpaper is disgusting. Look at the way it sags."

"Don't we all?" I said.

HIGH MAINTENANCE WOMAN was not amused. Instantly, she sprang into action like a whirling dervish.

Down came the wallpaper. When HIGH MAINTENANCE WOMAN stopped whirling, most of the wallpaper lay in shreds on the floor, but some of it stubbornly clung to the walls.

"This bathroom looks worse than ever!" I cried. It was a motley mess of wallpaper fragments, brown wallpaper backing that wouldn't give up its hold, bare cracked plaster, and the original sky blue paint, which had seem its better days over sixty years ago. I would have sunk to the floor in despair except I couldn't get there. The surface of the floor was blocked by the ladder, piles of shredded wallpaper, paint brushes, a container of patching plaster, the towel racks I had taken off the walls, a large water bottle, a five-gallon bucket, and several scraping utensils.

"Have no fear! HIGH MAINTENANCE WOMAN is here."

Those were the last words I heard from HIGH MAINTENANCE WOMAN before I gave up and went to bed. I have only to wonder what comes next and to ask what Pandora's Box I opened when I decided to deal with the visible signs of aging in my bathroom.

Biking Through History

2011-08-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

The York Heritage Trail

Earlier this week my husband and I spent a morning riding the York Heritage Trail in Central PA. Later that day, at our motel, I went out walking toward a nearby strip mall.

This is part of what writer James Howard Kunstler calls"The Geography of Nowhere." In that book, Kunstler wrote about the "tragic sprawlscape of cartoon architecture, junked cities, and ravaged countryside." After we left the York Heritage Trail, I saw examples of two out of three:

Cartoon Architecture

Ravaged Countryside
Cherry Tree by Ryan Homes
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We have traded Central PA views like the above for views like the one below, which I saw when I made a 180-degree turn after taking the above picture.

Behind the strip mall

I keep thinking back to those beautiful vistas along the York Heritage Trail and wondering why we traded it all away.

But then I realize I'm not really making a fair comparison. The real comparison should be between our business districts now and the North Central Railroad, long before it became the York Heritage Rails Trail.

Hanover Junction Station

Here it is today. I think it's a museum.

This all reminded me of what I read recently in Bettina Selby's book, RIDING NORTH ONE SUMMER, about cycling through England in the late 1980's. She made this observation after riding on a rails trail:

... I followed the Sett Valley downstream, riding the trail that had recently been constructed from the defunct Hayfield to Manchester branch railway line... It wasn't like being on a natural path either, because it didn't follow the contours of the ground but had, in godlike fashion, evened out every rise and hollow, and flattened all but the most gentle of gradients. It had taken such herculean labors, such armies of Irish navvies, to build the embankments, to tunnel through the hills and to construct the viaducts and bridges of these marvelous feats of engineering, that it all seemed a little out of proportion for them to have become the haunts of machines that do not need rails and can so easily go up and down hills...

Bicycle Sculptures at Seven Valleys Trail Access/ York Heritage Trail

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs

2011-08-20T04:09:00.000-07:00

Does it make your fingers tired just looking at this picture? Maybe that's just a sign of how lazy my fingers have gotten. I did my first typing on a machine like this one. I can't exactly say that I "learned to type" because I never really did learn to touch type. Even today, after decades of typing, or keyboarding as they call it now, I couldn't tell you where a single letter is located on the keyboard. My fingers just kind of go there out of habit. I don't know how many fingers you're supposed to use in typing. I use four, I think.

A few months ago, the New York Times ran an article on the revival of interest, especially among the young, in typewriters.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/fashion/31Typewriter.html?_r=1&src=tptw

Suddenly, typewriter fonts are hip. Those smudges that annoyed us in the old days are cool now.

My mother, a "real typist," used to practice with this sentence: Now is the time for all good men to come to the service of their country. I checked online for information about the origin of that sentence.

Who originated, "Now is the time for all good men ..."

September 16, 1977

Dear Cecil:

Where did the sentence, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the service of their country" originate?

— Lotte B., Phoenix

Cecil replies:

From the typewriter it came, and to the typewriter it shall return: the phrase was proposed as a typing drill by a teacher named Charles E. Weller. Incidentally, many typing books now use the variant "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country" instead, because it exactly fills out a 70-space line if you put a period at the end.

— Cecil Adams

But a new typewriting generation also requires new typing drills.

Above is today's go-to sentence for testing out new fonts. Here is how it is described in the Urban Dictionary:

A shorter sentence than "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" which uses every letter in the alphabet, a pangram. First mentioned in Mark Dunn's book Ella Minnow Pea.

All this talk about typewriters is making me nostalgic for those clattering keys and those smudged letters. I think I'll go out to the thrift shop and see if they have any old typewriters for sale.