I Shall Try.

Oooh, Pretty Lights! (found here)

I found this at Whiskey River, one of my daily stops in Blogland:

• "Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person's face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It's okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise."
  - Miranda July
  

And this, too:

• "Don't disregard your life. It is too precious. This moment, right now, is the only life you will ever have. You can't store it up for the ideal time. When you walk, walk with your whole body and mind joining the floor. Place your eyes in the soles of your feet, walking as if the floor were a dear friend. This is intimacy with all things, where the whole world is self, where there is no "outside" or other."
  - Pat Phelan
  

The Stripper

Not that kind of stripper.

Saturday morning brought rain to town, and cold, toe-numbing, dampness into the house, so I decided to put up the foam weather stripping bought a few weeks ago...when it was still relatively warm outside. Package said it was a piece of cake (or words to that effect) to install. I like cake. A lot.

This was not a piece of cake. First I had to remove some pieces of old felt stripping that predated our ownership, probably by thirty years or more. Someone had pounded long tacks into the stuff and the tacks had rusted over the years. Several of the tack heads crumbled when I attempted to remove them. However, I realized (after the fourth tack and two skinned knuckles) that the old stuff had been applied to the wrong face of the door jamb, and the correct one had no felt stripping at all...and no tacks. I like no tacks. Almost as much as I like cake. But not quite.

This foam looks like grey marshmallow. It has sticky stuff on one side that could hold an alligator, in a full death roll, as still as stone. I learned this when I applied a strip to the hinge edge of the door jamb, in the wrong direction - could not close the door. Okay. No problem. I'll just use the carpet cutting blade of my utility pocket knife and scrape the strip off - easy-peasy, puddin' and pie. I like pie, too. A lot.

I don't like humble pie, though, and I had to eat a couple of slices of that after telling the Universe that this job was going to be easy-peasy, puddin' and...well, you know.

As I scraped (and scraped, and scraped) off the marshmallow strip from hell, I gathered it in my other hand, not thinking about the alligator bit. Finished with the removal from the door jamb, I then began the battle to remove it from my hand. Now, given that the wad of stripping was stuck rather firmly to the one hand, wouldn't you think it would occur to me that if I pulled at it with the empty hand that it would stick to that one as well? You're nodding your head, aren't you, amused at my stupidity. Unh-hunh. I can feel the vibrations through the keyboard.

Went into the kitchen for a paper towel to dispose of the mess now in both hands. The adhesive from the weather stripping is stronger than paper, and stronger than my will to remove the strips from my hands, my sight, my house. I now had weather stripping and shreds of paper towels in each hand.

A lock of hair fell across my face and I reached up to brush it aside. Oh. Yes. I. Did.

For nearly ten minutes I contemplated abandoning the house, getting into my truck and leaving the country. I could imagine the conversation at the border when I try to explain to the border guards about the grey worm-like appendages growing from each palm. I just hope they'd try patting me down, because I would return the favor, sticky worms and all. (Actually, that might be a whole lot of fun.)

After I yanked out a dozen or so hairs by the roots (none of them grey), I checked the cupboard in the bathroom for a solvent of some kind. Tried rubbing alcohol - no go. Then hairspray, witch hazel rub, hand cream and lip gloss - none of them worked, and now I was highly flammable as well as sticky. My hands were covered in a low-tech version of napalm.

I wanted to cry, but could only laugh. My hands reeked and were beginning to sting from all the things I used. Stumbled my way into the kitchen and used my elbow to lift the water lever and ran cold water over my hands. The grey marshmallow stuff soaks up water rather well, which shouldn't surprise me, I guess - it is foam, after all. The water made the foam heavy and it started to fall off my hands - well, most of it, anyway. Grabbed more paper towels and was able to pull off more of the stripping. Hurray! This is going to work out just fine.

Looked under the sink where I store all the other household chemicals, like lye, bleach, sulphuric acid and formaldehyde. No, no - only the usual stuff, honest. There used to be a bottle of degreaser gunk, but I used it a couple of years ago, to clean the outside of the stove. Went through my mental list of home remedies for household problems. I know that if bubble gum gets stuck in fabric, you can put it in the freezer and the gum will break off. In my case, my fingers would break off, and that was a tad too extreme a cure.

Then I remembered olive oil. Wonderful multi-purpose olive oil. It can be used to remove the adhesive left behind when you remove the price label from glass, metal and plastic goods. Found my bottle of extra-virgin, poured a little on each palm, and rubbed my hands together as if I were trying to start a fire with two sticks.

Ta-da! It worked!

After cleaning my hands of the oil, I returned to the original task and finished laying the stripping around the door jamb.

Not only is it warmer in the back room now, but it is also quieter - a welcome bonus. Next time I am faced with a sticky situation, I will reach for my bottle of olive oil, and all will be right as rain in no time at all.

I need to write this stuff down, because I'll likely forget it by the time I need it again.

I'll do that, just as soon as I have that piece of cake.
(c) 2009 Martha McLemore

All the Stockings Were Hung

Sofie invited Legs-the-SPIDER to hang her stockings, forgetting that Legs has eight to Sofie's two. What do you put in a SPIDER's stocking, anyway?

Maybe I don't really want to know. Yeah, I don't. Eww-w-w-w!

All I Want for Christmas

Winter Scene Here

I was thinking earlier about Santa and when I stopped believing in the possibility such a person existed. I was fourteen. What can I say, I'm a late-comer to most of life's Big Truths. It was three days before Christmas and my aunt was taking us home after having dinner with her and her family. Christmas in the New Orleans area can be cold, but it rarely ever snows there. I looked out the rear window of the station wagon at the full moon against a midnight-blue sky. A few long pale clouds sailed in front of the moon, darkening the earth below. Then they passed and the moonlight brightened everything almost as if the sun had come out. I thought of Clement Moore's poem about the night before Christmas and started to recite it. My youngest cousin was maybe seven years old, but he turned to me with a worldly smile and asked the question I'd tried to avoid ever since I was ten.

"You don't still believe in Santa Claus, do you?"

"Don't you?" I asked, trying not to answer his question.

That was the wrong thing to say.

"Hey, you guys," he yelled gleefully. "Guess who still believes in Santa! MARTHA!"

It wasn't that I didn't know who provided all the gifts under the tree each year. It was just that I didn't want to stop believing there was someone out there who knew what I wanted and, if I were good, really, really good, would see that I got my heart's desire.

What sealed it for me was when, instead of the record player I wanted, there was a 20-inch fashion doll (this was before Barbie, but the doll was a giant version of that) sitting under the tree with my name on it. Somewhere in my stash of old photos, there is one of me sitting in front of that horrendous aluminum, slice-and-dice, Christmas tree holding the doll in my lap. The smile on my face belies the disappointment inside. (Such an ungrateful wretch - probably shouldn't have received anything.)

Over the years whenever I've read the poem, or told little kids, "Yes, there really is a Santa Claus," I cringed inside at the memory. Now I say that many people believe in Santa, but I've not seen him yet.

Even so, this post was going to be a mock-serious letter to Santa, in which I was going to ask for selfish things like a magic heating-oil tank that refilled itself automatically, or money to pay the taxes so I can keep my home, or - I am chagrined to admit this - please, just let me win the big lottery. It was to be an attempt at humor to cover up or mask my whining - again.

Before I could get in the mood for writing such drivel, I stopped at the Whiskey River blog and found the following prayer, which humbled me and snapped me out of my pity-party. As I am now entering the winter of my life, these few words, laden with such meaning, are better than any letter to Santa, better than there being a Santa in the first place. And I have been good this year, and this is my heart's most secret desire.

• God, give us a long winter
  and quiet music, and patient mouths,
  and a little pride - before
  our age ends.
  Give us astonishment
  and a flame, high, bright.
  - Adam Zagajewski

If I don't get back here before Friday, let me wish you all a long winter filled with bright lights, songs and much love from those you hold dear.

(c)2009 Martha McLemore

For Good Cooks Everywhere

Image found here

Just a bit of whimsy, especially for Plutarch, but for soup-makers everywhere.

I Miss My Camera.

This morning dawned bright and sunny, with sunbeams bouncing off all the snow at a myriad angles - no need for lights on in the house yet. Everything in the yard is wearing a 12-inch, or higher, cap of snow, like the chimes in my drawing. (Wish I had a camera. My drawing doesn't do the chimes justice.)

...

Don't know if you remember my neighbor, Mike, whom I sometimes refer to as the "Butcher (of trees) from Pittsburgh." Well, I may have to reconsider my unkindness toward him. Several times during the storm yesterday and last evening, Mike got out his brand-new snow blower and cleared the alley between our properties. Granted, he did it because he has to go to work and didn't want to be plowed in by the borough plows, as we usually are each winter, but he blew snow away from where I pull out into the alley, as well. Thank you, Mike. (Perhaps I'll make a fruitcake for him. But, you might be thinking - especially if you're from the US - isn't that worse than calling him the Butcher from Pittsburgh? Okay, okay...I'll make snickerdoodles.)

...

Watched two crows frolicking in the snow on the carport roof earlier this morning. They were so comical, flinging snow about with their bills, almost as if having a snowball fight. Then they took turns, while one stood watch, rolling in the fluffy stuff like I've seen kids and dogs do, their birdy feet flailing in the air. Their snow-fun was arrested when a Cooper's hawk flew over, but then the chase-the-hawk fun began. Yelling for their compatriots to join them, the two snow-flingers lit out after the Cooper's with determination and great speed. That poor hawk had to dodge seven or eight crows around the neighborhood, until he lighted in one of the tall larches down the alley and hunkered down to wait them out.

...

The Kids were over last night. We had turkey-brown rice soup (not so adventurous after all, Plutarch) then sorted out Christmas decorations. In the midst of giving over to Kareema all the decorations I'd collected and used over the forty years I've been "doing" Christmas, I was overcome with a slight melancholy, very slight. (Perhaps melancholy is too strong.) I realized that I was passing the baton, so to speak, to the next generation, because she will be doing Christmas from now on. I mentioned this to Kareema as I passed to her some of the old homemade decorations we've always used.

...

She said she understood.

...

"You're not the Christmas-mommy, anymore," she said.

...

I am now the Matriarch, with all the weightiness that title carries with it, but no longer the focus of family holiday activities.

...

I kept a few items that have deep sentimental value to me, such as the long rubber Chinese-style dragon and the stuffed California-raisin guy. Most important were the pieces she, my brother Don and I made of salt-dough almost 37 years ago, the year after my mother died and Don (17 at the time, same age as grandson Donovan is now) came to live with me in California. If I ever get a tree again, those few pieces will decorate it, but I'm not buying any new decorations.

...

Sigh...oh, the things the snow brings.

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore

SNOW!

It started sometime after midnight and is still coming down, though not quite so hard. Quack, quack; waddle-waddle.

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore