Previous month:
May 2009
Next month:
July 2009

Visually Clueless

P1000539


has happened to summer?*


P1030232



Oh, but that this was MY office space for the summer.....



P1030235


And these were MY office supplies. . .



P1030236 

Ya think this is belongs to a New Jersey housewife?

(Totally blaming the weather on my new addiction to trashy reality series.....)


P1000538

Note to self:

So quit bitching about the weather and start making some art....



and no



butts about it



(totally blaming the weather for lame blog jokes......)




____________

****this font brought to you by The Teen (not really, but in her honor).



Home Again Home Again Jiggety Jig

0615091335


CURRENTLY CONTEMPLATING



        • Buying a row house in Baltimore by the harbor
        • And then a camp on the Eastern Shore
        • Eating more steamed crabs on a tablecloth of Kraft paper
        • Buying a French press for al fresco morning cafe au laits
        • Wondering whether The Teen will eat anything other than sugar for 4 weeks
        • Wondering where The Teen gets her courage to go off alone to work 12 hours a day at her passion for 4 weeks
        • Whether I can justify my third coffee of the day
        • Redoing our bedroom to look like a boutique hotel:
            • sisal wall to wall
            • upholstered headboard
            • king sized bed
            • flat screen TV
            • silk drapes
            • matching dog beds
            • dogs that will sleep in dog beds and not on ours
        • Where all my readers/commenters have gone


Favor

I have removed the new widget that runs at the bottom of the posts as "you might like these stories" because I think the script is causing the access issues some of you have been reporting. If anyone is still having trouble accessing the posts or leaving comments, please drop me a line at [email protected] so I can continue to work with SixApart to resolve the problem. Thanks!


The Growing Season

We've had so much rain that the plant and bushes are just bursting with growth, sending tendrils up in the air and grabbing at anything to support their waterlogged stems.

I have never had lusher roses and hydrangeas. Now we hold our breath that the rain tapers off because we are just on this side of garden rot and it if doesn't dry out soon, we are going to start to lose a lot of plants.

As well as our sanity.

Pictures of the garden? Pictures of the new garden bed? Would be nice, no? But the rain again....too dark by the time I get home from work or too wet.

I did manage to capture a few moments of sunshine in the backyard where the climbing roses are just thrilled at all this moisture. Look away, all ye professional gardeners and do not spate on my bedraggled bushes which are in sure need of good pruning and staking!

104_1235

Mr. Pom almost ripped out these pinks last year when the arbor vitae had shaded them out of any bloom. Glad he never found the time.



104_1242




Ditto with the red ramblers. The little dogwood is crowding out their growing and sun space and they are in the habit of getting in under the gutter of the garage, which is not good. But look at these beauties!  Hard to imagine how such a slender stem supports so many blooms.  how could I ever trim these back??


104_1236

Other things around the house are growing, too.



104_1251

Remember Little Cucciolo?



IMG_0190



How innocent! How angelic! (See the ottoman next to him - it's in the basement waiting for the day when I can completely restuff the bottom since we discovered he was crawling under it and systemically pulling out all the fibers.)



104_1244


He's gotten a tad larger......




104_1245

Bella Sera, who turned three this week, has actually gotten a tad smaller as her son, the crazed demon pup, keeps her going all day long and she's lost all of her postpartum chub! You go girl!


And speaking of growing older, the baby of the family is about to break all our hearts and go off for a month on her own.    How did it come to be so quickly that all my children are grown? I like it - and I don't.


In early spring, we were at College Night at the high school. She took me over to a bulletin board in a hallway that was a display of her art class's self portraits. I found her drawing immediately - a lovely likeness, I agreed.

She waited for me to notice something else. The board was heavily collaged and I didn't immediately see it.

And then I gasped.

And then I almost burst into tears - in the hallway! of the high school! with a million people she knew all around us!

Her baby picture.

The assignment was to draw a self portrait of herself now and when she was a toddler.

Words cannot express how I felt seeing a long lost photo come alive under my own child's hand, and the startling likeness.

104_1283


She's never getting these drawings away from me and the second I have a chance, they are getting framed and hung in the living room. They had a place of honor at MM's party and she was just mortified, of course. Savvy mothers reading this post will understand why I put this photo at the bottom and didn't lead off with it - this way she may never notice it and demand I take it down!

Honestly, I don't think I've ever gotten a greater gift. So of course, I am never satisfied and I demanding that she do the same for her brother and sister's baby photos, too.

A happy mom.


Little Miss Perfect

Today is the calm before the storm - again - because tomorrow is  D-Day: pack up The Teen for her month long pre-college program far away. It will be a mad dash of a day to Target, grocery store, a shoe store, the art store and packing, washing, ironing.

And since it may be the only day we spend together this summer until we go to the Cape, I am hoping for a mother daughter mani/pedi and quick zip into the city to our fave place for breakfast. Now that The Teen has a job, she's no longer our sweet companion on our weekend jaunts and I miss her.

Mother/daughter relationships: so fraught with tension, love, judgment, acceptance, miscommunication, joy, sorrow, tears, and laughter. 

Whatever my faults as a mother and my daughters' frustrations with me, I know that they know they are loved and cherished and enjoyed. I know they are not perfect and they certainly know I am not.

And I never entered them in a beauty pageant.

Being rarely home during the day, I am unfamiliar with daytime TV choices. Feeling under the weather today, I came home early from work and just wanted to lie on my bed and veg out. Flipping around the channels, I stopped at "Little Miss Perfect".  Thinking it was the movie, which I now realize is "Little Miss Sunshine", I discovered it was a reality TV show on child Beauty Queens. I watched the  hour with my jaw hanging down like a mule on crack.

The first episode  featured an absolutely darling, sweet, not overly made up but completely self-conscious little girl being made to wear a snake around her neck for a talent competition,  and was then followed up by an hour long show where moms and daughters are competing together as beauty contestants.

I just don't know  child beauty pageants still existed. For some reason, I thought they had been outlawed after the Jon Benet tragedy. Obviously I was talking through my hat since it appears it is alive and well and about as close to legalized child pornography and abuse as one can get without having Child Protective Services busting down your door.

Hair extensions, fake tans, acrylic nails, full make up, Dolly Parton look-alike hair styles, enough sequins to make Bob Mackie jealous, and the most revolting poses, dances, and sexual coquettishness to make Nabokov blush.  Sad faces, robotic-like runway strutting, fake eyelashes, and the parents crying over having to tell their daughters that the "judges didn't think she was pretty enough" when she loses the competition.

AAARGH!  The years of therapy! The self-worth issues! The food control, sexual acting out, drug abuse, wrapped tighter than a drum perfectionism.........

I don't which episode was worse: the one featuring little kids with the thousand-dollar dresses and Southern moms parading their kewpie doll daughters across runways while they wipe tears from their unmade up eyes. Maybe it was just this episode, but it seemed as though the more ornate and sexual the child's appearance and demeanor, the more plain and unkempt the mother's appearance.

Now I am now writing about good ol' soccer moms with mom jeans and Gap t-shirts; I am talking about women who look like they do not even pass a brush over their hair or look in a mirror in the course of a week, but slavishly fuss over every sequin, eyelash, and hair extension on their child. Moms who had black roots under the most bleached out hair and triple X bodies (in size not adult content) who were rubbing glue sticks on their daughter's chest because the little one didn't have an actual chest to keep their sexually precocious  dress from falling down.

The next show featured  mother and daughter competitions, with Dad's helping to choreograph dance routines using  kitchen chairs and camo hats. (Every Dad featured had a mullet or a ponytail and some form of camo.)  The children walked liked they were made of porcelain and their mouths were frozen in smiles. The moms were getting botox and squeezing into gowns they once wore 30 pounds and/or 30 years ago.

Hard to say which was more jaw-dropping or troubling, the intensity of the moms who had completely let their own self images plummet into the basement in order to micromanage every fake hair on their daughters' heads, or the moms getting their lips botoxed and squeezing themselves into gowns last worn 20 years/10 pounds ago. 

At the risk of being tarred and feathered, I have to say that it brings up some of the most unpleasant  aspects of living in the South - not that all these people were from the South, but it was a definite culture prevalent there at many levels and in many forms.

I know that this sounds like a very east coast putdown. And I am painfully aware that  this beauty pageants are just a more disturbing level of the more popular culture of pressuring kids to compete in sports, academics, and college placements.

And while I want to grab some of my kids' friends and tell them to slow down and take a couple weeks  off from the pre-college classes, college boards prep, volunteer activities, and athletic camps to just sit in the sun and throw each other in the pool, at least I have never had to shudder at hearing one of their  moms tell them that when they are walking down the runway in front of the judges to be sure to put  put "some brass in their ass".








Summertime & The Reading Is Easy Or Not

In the early afternoon of a misty, grey Saturday, we found ourselves in our favorite Cape bookstore, The Brewster Bookstore. I certainly didn't need to be there; my big blue bike bag was full of books I'd brought from home:

  • ImageDB.cgi Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson: 
  • This was a Cornflower recommendation (increasingly the source of all my favorite reads). Written b the author of The Haunting of Hill House and the short story, The Lottery, this pre-Erma Bombeck memoir of raising a young family in Vermont is splendid - witty, intelligent and just infectiously good-humored. 
  • 51RBBZA3KDL._SS500_ I had to follow her memoir up with her dark comedy, We've Always Lived in the Castle. I'm only a quarter of the way into it but it involves two isolated, eccentric sisters, their invalid uncle, and a bowl of arsenic-tainted sugar......

  • Country_ With a very special place close to my heart, I've been carrying around Country Matters, a collection of the writings of Jo Northrop, the late columnist for Country Living. I discovered the existence of her book after writing the post on magazines last week and I ordered it immediately. I am savoring it one essay at a time, hoping to keep it in the reading pile for the rest of the month.

  • Strange The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters:  No one does a Gothic ghost story with as much restraint as Sarah Waters, except Henry James. Creepy,  absorbing, and so perfectly paced that the tension becomes unbearable and ultimately the end is both puzzling and apparent.  The main character of this novel, by an author twice nominated for the Booker prize, is not the doctor/narrator nor the almost spinster daughter with athletic legs, but the crumbling, decaying manor house with which everyone is the story is obsessed. 

  • Book For a complete change of pace after a very long foray into English country manor between the wars impoverished gentry balls in the house with dawn champagne breakfasts and libraries with the wallpaper peeling off the walls and down at the heels maiden aunts and mothers in threadbare gowns and a ghost in the attic nursery . . .I am about to begin My Cousin the Saint by Justin Catanoso, a memoir about a New Jersey Italian American who discovers that his grandafather's cousin was a "Vatican-certified miracle worker". Sounds just ofbeat and engrossing enough for the pleasures of summer reading.


Where was I? Oh, yes - I had all these books in the pile and about twenty more, but when I saw this cover on the bookstore table, there was absolutely no way it was not going home with me:


Spivet

This improbable book is the story of Tecumseh Sparrow Spiver, a twelve-year old prodigy cartographer who lives on an isolated ranch with his silent, dysfunctional family, composed of his self-engrossed, scientist mother, self-engrossed, silent cowboy father, his frustrated, lonely teen age sister, and the lingering shadow of his deceased brother who T. S. may or may not have caused to die. 

The design of the book is splendid:   an  oversized 8 inches wide with a 4 inch sidebar on either side that are bursting with T. S.' s hand-drawn illustrations and maps that have a vintage, antique quality. Only in the seventh grade, T. S. already has had illustrations and maps published in Scientific American, Nova, and for the Smithsonian. He maps out all part of his world, from the water tables of Montana to the number of bad ears of corn in his sister's bucket, to the number of times his father sips his whiskey while he watches his cowboy movies. The recent trauma of his brother's death is told mainly in the sidebars, which are crammed with cross-sections of insects, sewer systems, and the flights of bats.

The story itself is a wild, sometimes sad ride as T. S. takes off from home on his Quixote-like cross country journey and discovers more about his family than he could know while living in their midst.  I read it the entire way home in the car from Cape Cod and finished it tonight after dinner.

For someone like myself, who loves to journal and sketch, the drawings, charts, maps, and diagrams make my head buzz and my fingers itch to add them to my own journals.  Today, during a particularly boring stretch of a deposition, I found myself charting the number of questions and answers given per minute in a ten minute stretch...

Please let me know what you are reading, what suggestions you have to share that we can look forward to putting on our own TBR piles!


Grace Between the Raindrops

It has been an incongruous spring and early summer. Instead of sweet-smelling evenings and light-filled days,  rain has wrapped round us like late fall and the evenings dim with cloud coverage and cold temperatures meant for blankets and cups of tea instead of ceiling fans and lemonade.

We're a little bit tired of it, wearied of it, really. My wardrobe of new skirts and patent leather sling backs seems to mock me each morning and I have to resist my goose fleshed arms reach for turtlenecks and wool pants and yes, even boots.

I know it's the 8th straight day of rain and 55 degree mornings, but today I could not take one more day of black and brown and put on a skirt - an off-white button down the front canvas straight skirt, with a print top and pink short sleeved cardigan. I did put on patent leather flats and sighed over the pretty canvas ones that would have gotten ruined in the rain. My bare legs were a bit wet and cold, but the pink sweater was commented on by more than a few spring-starved souls.

One of my concessions to working for a living (as if I have to deem to concess to a life-sustaining activity) is to make my office a place of comfort. For years I believed that a working woman needed to have a utilitarian, impersonal space designed to impart only the fiercest confidence in clients and superiors. There would be no breaching of the professional aura by doodads and gizmos or homey touches.

Now, I no longer care. I am who I am and if I have to spend 56 hours a week in a room, I better be surrounded by photos of loved ones, color, my own paintings, a tray of shells, pretty boxes, and other bits and pieces of art I've picked up here and there. I have my "Beach" fragrance beads that a lovely blog reader sent me.

One of my absolute musts is a desk lamp. I cannot stand fluorescent lights. A desk lamp's ambient light makes all the difference between feeling imprisoned and feeling if not at home, then at least in a place of my choosing.

I am blessed with an office with a wall of windows and my desk lamp, although small, is usually enough. These gloomy mornings, however, my little lamp barely penetrates the darkness but I am stubborn in not switching on the above the head horror of humming, white jailhouse lighting.

Each dark, rainy morning this week, someone has walked by and wondered aloud if I was there - oh yes, I see you now, they kid, peering as if with a flashlight into a rainforest. I had to resist the urge to conform and switch on the ceiling light but stuck to my guns.   Since 99.9% of our time is spent on laptops, there's really very little need for other light sources, unless you are the type who forsakes coffee and may be found asleep and drooling over a keyboard in a darkened room.

We moved into these offices two months ago and since  I brought in my little lamp, a white metal carved base with a pretty chintz fabric shade,  it's drawn a lot of attention from other women on the staff. One by one, pretty lamps have sprouted on desks up and down the hallway.

One attorney has an elegant Tiffany inspired light that casts jeweled shadows across her desk. Another has a large, lime green, barrel-shaded contemporary that I lust after.  In further gentrification of our spaces, house plants have become popular.   A huge rubber tree was seen ambling across the floor, its owner trudging behind it, completely hidden by the leaves like an explorer on safari.

I, myself, have killed a lavender plant and ivy plant - the type that a nuclear war could not spoil - in the space of six weeks and I am plantless at the moment. I have decided that rather than buy another potted plant, one that I will promptly forget to water and find dried like hay after I return from vacation, I will wait and buy a small ficus. Is there a season for ficus? Will I find it turning sickly and yellow and need a rake? Probably, but it will be a new office topic of conversation and I predict many more small trees foresting our office floor.



The Calm Before The Storm

Dudettes! I am so tired! Getting ready for MM's graduation party and a wicked week at work.

But - look! The sun and blue skies for the first time since last Sunday!! Woo hoo! Just in time for the tent to be delivered so we don't have water dripping on the tables.

We've cleaned out the rooms, made space in the kitchen, put all the leaves in the dining room table, ordered the food, and gotten loads of candles - oh, and beer. (They are all over 21...)

Tune in Sunday for pics of the big event. If I'm not too exhausted to raise a camera. Where is that camera and I bet it's not charge.....

Menu:

  • cheeseburger sliders
  • pulled pork sliders
  • grilled chicken
  • mac and cheese
  • penne a la rabbiata with broccoli rabe and sausage
  • eggplant parm
  • bruschetta
  • chicken wings

Can you tell by the menu that there are mainly college boys coming?? And now I'm freaking out that I don't have enough and I should have ordered a 3 foot sub....

See y'all in a day or two!

P.S. If you are having trouble getting my blog to open or leaving comments, would you drop me a line at [email protected]?  I've had complaints from a few people and I posted a bunch of replies to comments yesterday and they never showed up on the site.

Thanks!


I Have Issues

It really is a wonder that any print journalism is able to stay afloat these days. I realized this week that I no longer rush to the mailbox at the beginning of the month to wait for "my magazines". First off, most of my magazines went belly up this year (Country Home, Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion) and the remaining ones have so few pages and so little content that I just breeze through them while standing in front of the racks at Borders. 

 

Lifecover  


I grew up in a magazine reading household. My mother kept a big, flat wicker basket on the second floor hall up against the stairwell and all our magazines were thrown in there until someone weeded them out and stacked them on the shelf by the basement where they were handy for school projects. 

Look  



That basket was filled with the magazines of the day: Time, Life, Look,
 Readers Digest, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal,  and the occasional Redbook before the cover featured how to have an orgasm a minute.  We learned about current events from Time, we were introduced to photojournalism in Life and Look (who would ever forget the photo of John-John saluting JFK's flag-draped coffin on the strong steps of The White House),  repeated jokes from Humor in Uniform in  Readers Digest, learned ten ways to serve meatloaf in Family Circle, read each spouse's side of the story in Can This Marriage Be Saved (worrying if our parents exhibited any of these symptoms) and learned how to write a short story by reading them over and over in Redbook.


Fam



In a houseful of five daughters, there were also plenty of issues of Highlights, American Girl, Seventeen, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and even a few copies of Cosmopolitan that my oldest sister  hid from my mother in her dresser.

 Every August, we mooned over the back to school issue of Seventeen, wishing we could buy the plaid skirts, woolen crew neck sweaters and  Weejun loafers, that were impossibly hot to wear for the first day of school in September.


 17


Do you notice that this girl actually looks "plump"?? 


When I was  a young married and paper was just invented, I discovered a new magazine, Country Living, that set the design standard that coalesced with our obsession with the PBS show, This Old House. Once we found an impossibly out of date and out of the way old house to buy in the woods, we promptly filled it with Sturbridge plaid draperies, turn of the century quarter sawn oak furniture, and a Queen Anne camel back sofa.


Country_Living-1985-1


I hoarded those issues and spent many a rainy afternoon pulling all of them out and planning what to stencil on the kitchen walls (tulips) and how to decorate The Princess's nursery (Gear Yellow Rubber Duckies).  Soon after, I began reading Country Home, Victoria, Mary Engelbreit, and a variety of quilting magazines.

2909928814_039f1cf720_o


In the mid-90's, we moved to Memphis and my taste morphed from plaid wing chairs to chintz-covered slipper chairs. The calico print camel back sofa sported a new slipcover of blue and white glazed cotton. Soon Traditional Home and House Beautiful  began filling my mailbox and I became expert at faux finishing and trompe l'oiel and other French design elements that I half understood.


Somerset


One day,  on one of my almost daily trips to Michael's for some craft supply, I spied   a magazine cover with a photo of a wooden box covered with old maps and an "antique letter" created on parchment with rubber stamps and collage. I bought my first edition of Somerset Studio and my little craft world exploded. I was published in the magazine within the year and my life expanded tenfold and now I am a regular contributor to what I consider the premier mixed media art publication, Cloth, Paper, Scissors.

Images



I feel adrift without the regular issues filling my mailbox. I am glad for the issues I've kept over the years and mourn the complete editions of those I trashed on our cross country moves. I've even gone so far as to buy sets of back issues of the original  Victoria on Ebay.

Gdhskping


Most of my free reading time ( as opposed to reading for work time and reading for pleasure, i.e. novels time)  is spent not reading costly  magazines, but a long list of blogs  filled with gorgeous photography  about decorating, remodeling, thrifting, faux finishing, vintage collecting, drapery sewing, garden growing, collage making, studio outfitting, basket weaving, yarn dying, quilt making, book binding, story writing, canvas painting, child rearing, and party throwing blogs.

Mad

It's just not the same, though. Sitting on my bed with a cup of tea and a cashmere throw across my legs is just much nicer with a the crinkly papers of a magazine than with a cold, rectangular laptop.  It's almost too much, what I can find on the 'net. Printing out photos for a class project just isn't the same as tearing them out of a set of old magazines.  And there's no moving, first person end page story to read before I log off for the night.

Hi

More importantly, I can't trace my evolution as a person, as a homeowner, as an artist and writer from the Internet. I can't lug out my back issues of a blog and say, look, this is the article that inspired me to make a wedding ring quilt for my sister's wedding, or pull a dog-eared issue of a blog off the shelf to revisit for the first column I read by Jo Northrup in Country Living. 

Country_

Of course, I am using the internet to write about magazines!  Come to think of it, those monthly columns by Jo Northrup in which she wrote about her life in the country were the first thing I read when I got the magazine each month, and inspired me to begin writing about my ordinary life, which led over many years to my blog.And I never would have gotten the column in CPS if I hadn't been on a big, prolific email list for years with one of the editors.

But I'll always prefer paper over plastic, pages over screens, and that  is why I will never have a Kindle, no matter how much Mr. Pom swears at me when he lifts my carry-on as we board a plane.

Support a freelancer: go buy a magazine!





What Is So Rare Than a Saturday Morning in June

With apologies to James Russell Lowell.


104_1016
A photo not of our house


The noon church bells are pealing at the bottom of the hill and spread out over my neighborhood as I sit in the coolness of the porch. The gloomy rain of the past three days has finally ended and the morning's clouds are finally broken by the midday sun.

Mr. Pom and I breathe in the fresh, cool, earthy smells of late spring.  We sit in the stillness of the neighborhood, listening to the birds chirping and the church bells begin the prelude to Christ Jesus, Victor.  It is indeed a day to adore and celebrate what the Lord has given us.

The morning's errands are almost done. We have exercised the mutts, had our cappuccinos, trolled the Home Depot for sales on annuals, and loaded up the rear of the LabCruiser with as many bags of mulch as it can carry. Last Sunday, I used all my wifely wiles and motherly apron strings to induce Mr. Pom and Mystery Man to expand the narrow strip of garden bed under the living room window.

The idea was to balance out the wedge of garden on the other side of the lawn by expanding the strip in front of the house in curve over to  the giant mountain laurel that hides the porch. It took all afternoon, but they got most of the plants in and now we are mulching. It balances out the wedge of garden on the other side of the path.  Pictures will follow as soon as it is done.


P1020392
Typical the prohibiting of activities along the Sound




Of course, in gardening nothing is ever "done". Once I get the major shape and bones put in, I still have the ongoing planting to do as we fill out by season, shifting and transplanting and creating some unity so the eye has somewhere to rest.  We were rather haphazard in this endeavor, though we had a clear idea of what we were going to start with.

I choose to undertake this project whilst in the midst of finishing a submission. (One I had over two months to do, of course.) So there was much calling up to the window for me to fly down the stairs and out the front door to look at this arrangement or consult on what we needed in that corner.

The dogs were besides themselves as I flew out the front door, closing them in by themselves. They cannot go out in the front unless leashed because the front yard isn't fenced. I tried once before to keep them in the yard and the minute I grew distracted by a weed, they were a yard away and headed for the busy main street.

Eventually, I gave up the pretense of getting any art or writing done and joined the boys outside where I cut and laid landscape fabric. Mystery Man was taking a shower and Mr. Pom had gone on another Depot run. At some point MM thought I had the dogs and I thought he had the dogs and a search of the house revealed no dogs.

104_1018
Our new front lawn this is not.


After much frantic running around backyards and hollering their names across the neighborhood and as my stomach jolted everytime I heard a car speed by, MM called out for me to come inside. There, in their crates with the doors open, slept two sweet dogs who apparently knew that if no one was in the house, their crates were homebase and it was time for a snooze.

I took that as a sign for myself and turned on the TV to some inane cooking competition and quickly was snoring along with the dogs.  Weekends are meant for less heavy lifting, but it is almost summer and the outside chores are piling up. The work week was just as insane, hence the lack of posting here.

Today we are off to Niece #1's graduation from high school and next Saturday is MM's graduation party. There are annuals to plant, beds to mulch, back porches to paint, menus to plan, and oh, maybe some napping.

Posts to come: the gardens, spring reading, and summer books.

Miss you all !!




Tuesday

P1030232


CURRENTLY CONTEMPLATING

        • Taking a painting class from this artist - if only I'd written down her name last summer in Provincetown.
        • Taking this quilting class from Material Obsessions if they are set up to mail to the States. 
        • Moving in with Elspeth Thompson if she'll share her railroad car by the beach with the Pomegranates - we'll be happy in a tent dear Elspeth, you'll never know we're there.
        • Planting sunflower seeds along the back fence if it's not too late for a fall bloom.
        • Making mahi mahi tacos with mango salsa for dinner.
        • Whether to buy an elliptical trainer or a hatrack since Mr. Pom says both will end up being used the same way.
        • Cleaning my art studio, specfically the acrylic glaze/kitty litter incident from a few weeks back. I'd link to the post but then you would all know how long it's been drying on the studio floor into concrete and my face would be scarlet forever.