Here is another photo from the gathering at my mother’s house. She iced a yellow cake with sour cream (this is influenced from her Norwegian heritage) and then decorated it with fresh fruit.

I am told by family that Norwegians like to decorate food as it is presented on the table. A smorgasbord might contain bowls of potatoes or something, with cherry tomato halves and green peas assembled in some artful arrangement to make it prettier.

It was such an artform that the birthday girl did not at first want to cut into the cake. In the end, she was glad she had done it.

(For the record, the soft-turquoise tablecloth here is closer to the real color than the photo I posted a few days back.) 

Maybe you know I love resale shops. I find some amazing great clothing sometimes because I check them out. I particularly love it when I find hand-embroidered items or fine thin wool sweaters.

This week I had all of 10 minutes to blow on the way between two appointments. I happened to be near St. Vincent De Paul store.

Um, chrome makes me happy. And there between crummy old television sets and desk lamps, I saw this beauty. A bullet-shaped hair dryer from a long while ago. For $59, if I remember right.

I can’t have this, no matter how fun and beautiful it is. My house is full of too many things that I actually use.

Nevertheless, I really appreciated this lovely and well-designed relic of my childhood years. I took a photo and moved on.

A friendly woman looking at dresses stopped me to say how much she enjoyed my colorful clothing. We had a fun 2-minute talk about the joy of color. Again, I moved on.

I did not buy anything. That’s how it goes, sometimes.

My favorite color is turquoise. My wedding dress was a rich turquoise evening gown by Liz Claiborne, that’s how much I love the color.

So last weekend my Mom had guests. She moved a bigger table into the living room so we could all sit together. She set the table, and I sat down when nobody else was near me yet. I noticed how lovely the colors were. I took a photo.

And then I noticed. Mom loves color, too, she always has. Her colors are a little more subtle than mine, but not a lot and not always.

Yet here she is. Turqoise/blue/green chair upholstery, soft aqua tablecloth and napkins, greenish-aqua couch. Aqua carpet (which was a brighter variant on the midnight blue theme, for most of my formative years).

Yup. Apple, tree, definitely related. And I do not mind a bit.

I worked with Polymer clay exclusively for almost 10 years, before I picked up the knitting needles again. I made all sorts of fun things, including Hershberger Art Kazoos (TM). I have made nearly 200 kazoos and I think I’m not done yet, though I’m mostly focused on knitting these days.

I still teach polymer, but now I teach it mostly to knitters who make buttons to go with their precious handknits. The techniques most useful in buttonmaking are not the same as those most useful in jewelry or sculpture making.

I’ll be teaching buttons at Rae’s again this Sunday, September 21, from 1-5pm. Learn a good solid handful of techniques. Take a handful of goodies home with you, and inspiration to make more when you get there. Email infoAT raesyarnboutique DOT com to register.

I’d love to have you join me.

Left photo is one of many trays from students when I taught at Dallas-Ft. Worth Fiberfest. Top photo is a favorite button I made myself and kept just for me. It’s still waiting for the perfect felted bag.

A few weeks ago I danced with the Habibi Dancers at Sparrow Hospital on the lunch hour. Once a year they have Diversity days. This is the third year they have asked us to dance.

I love this sort of event. I tend to enjoy shows where we are closer to the audience, where I can interact with the folks who are watching.

I like to make eye contact and I don’t like the fuss of worrying about whether someone will pull open the curtain at the right time, whether there is a spotlight in the right place. I do the big-stage shows with the troupe, but my heart is in the community. I love dancing at my neighborhood restaurant, New Aladdin’s, for the same reasons.

So here we have several photos. I was in all of the group numbers but did not have a solo. Fortunately one friend took photos of the number I was in that everyone was not in. So the first photo shows me at center with two other dancers.

I am re-focusing lately here on my original premise for this blog. My theme is the fact that there is artfulness around us everywhere.

Not only is art the sort of thing one can frame and hang on the wall, but there is performing and costuming, writing and cooking and gardening… even making a warm and comfy space for a gathering, to me, is a sort of artform. In this case not only did we play wonderful music, we danced, and we wore wonderful costumes.

My costume here was made by another woman in the troupe. Some costumes are purchased, most commercial costumes are made in Turkey or Egypt.

(However, remember that what you choose to wear each day is another sort of costuming. You need no beads or fringe for your clothing choices to constitute a costume of a different sort. I adore clothing of many sorts, and costuming myself each day is one of my favorite activities.)

I loved this event. (For the record, this hospital is walking distance from Rae’s yarn shop, Foster Community Center where I teach knitting and dance, and the house I purchased for myself when I was single. It’s my still the neighborhood of my heart and where I am most of my waking hours, a wonderful place.)

The premise of the ColorJoy! blog is that there is artfulness all around us. Whether it be food or a garden, knitting or manufactured goods, there are beautiful things everywhere.

When Rae and I went to Stitches Midwest a few weekends ago, we spotted this irridescent New Beetle in the parking lot. Need I say more? ColorJoy in the happiest extreme!

My New Beetle is metallic bright blue. I wish it were purple (or turquoise) but I love it as it is. At one moment, I had a windfall and looked into how much it would cost to paint it purple. I decided to spend my money in other ways. I went to Africa.

I did the right thing by far. But when I see a paint job like this? I have a twinge of regret… then I take a picture and get on with my day. After all, at the time I took the photos here? I was wearing a beautiful hand-dyed caftan I purchased in Kenya on that trip.

‘Nuff said…

Just wondering if anyone out there knows… I want to use MS Outlook 2003 for my calendar, addresses and tasks, but not for email. Outlook seems to be flipping out that I don’t want to set it up for email. Does anyone know about this? Anything at all? I have done a little Google searching but I get answers to questions I did not ask.

I want to sync my Palm data to Outlook, and even at that level Outlook seems to be insisting that I have an email address set up so it can know which “user” to sync. I can not find a user setup in Outlook at all. I think I have to go to the Windows VISTA Control Panel under “mail” to set it up. Can that be right?

Any input would be good. I’ve used Microsoft Desktop programs for years but have avoided Outlook because of its inherent “strength” (that is, ability to disseminate viruses at lightning speed). Never mind that I truly adore Eudora for mail (I used version 1.0 on a mac once upon a time, before Internet Explorer or Outlook existed).

I think I have to set it up for email and somehow try to tell Windows not to use it for my primary email program. I would rather not do that, but I really want to use Outlook to sync with Google calendar (and at least for a while, my palm device).

Help? Hints?

I have not had such a nice weekend in so long I can not remember. I hope all of you did, as well.

The weather was gorgeous, sunny, hot, and perfect for daytime hammock sitting and almost-twilight bicycle riding. I worked on my Mom’s project (phase 1 of 4 is very close to done, we are both pleased). I knit, cooked, cleaned a little, did a project I had put off a long time.

I uninstalled software I don’t enjoy using, and installed some I like better. I cleared out old stuff from the office, cleared off the desk a bit, played some music with Brian and knit some more.

On Saturday I socialized a bit, tea with Sharon P and then a birthday/music party. I even got time to read some friends’ blogs and some of my email groups.

If there are three sorts of days off, I got approximately one of each with a little work thrown in. One day of socializing, one of lazing around and one of getting work done. Life is not often this lovely.

I wish for all of you that you feel a bit of my relaxation through the keyboard as you read this. I’ll bring photos back in the next post, but right now I need to go tuck myself into bed at a not-exactly-reasonable hour.

I don’t have an appointment Tuesday till 6pm, but I have more yet on my to-do list before I go out. Mom’s project will get another real push, and I have more software configuring to do. My goal there is to make the calendar I keep on my computer for classes, synchronize with Google Calendar for the world (my family and students, mostly) to see. I hope.

I think I have all the right pieces to do it but now I need to make all the gizmos and programs talk to one another… Palm Pilot to computer, computer to Google, all with different programs going on. It’s theoretically possible so I am pursuing it, will check back here to let you know how it’s going.

Drat, I’m chatting too much and it’s almost 3am. Goodnight, my friends!!!

P.S. if you want a nice photo or a few to look at, do go visit Kristin Nicholas’ Getting Stitched on the Farm!

I don’t relate easily to the idea of Laziness. I am always working, often at things I enjoy but always on the move. My attention is not good, so I often am working on things out of order from when they maybe “should’ be worked on, but I never seem to stop.

Once, many years ago, someone wanted to hurt my feelings and called me lazy. I was so surprised that I laughed. I may be inefficient, but lazy is just not my word. Apparently that word would have hurt them, but it did not do the same for me.

Maybe because of this tendency, I’m self employed. When I worked for other people, I would work till 9pm, 11pm, even past 1am when I had a key to let myself out. There was always something more to do, and I work best in silence. People distract me (in a pleasant way) from paperwork, so I did paperwork after hours. I still do.

Now I am a company of one, for the most part. I have wonderful friends and family who knit for me at times (you know who you are… thanks), but I write the patterns and then get good input, I knit the designs at least the first time around, I print my patterns, stuff them into page protectors, take orders, print packing slips, address envelopes, create/print invoices, deliver local pattern orders to shops. If I do not knit my own samples, I make sure the samples will happen somehow, arranging yarn and knitter for each project.

I write class handouts (including typing/layout on the computer), I teach classes. I schedule (ugh). I do my own publicity/press releases, I am the photographer and then the graphic artist for all my advertisements. I answer the phone and the emails. I am the publicist, the webmaster, the marketing guru, the everything. I do most of my techie work (though thank goodness I have great help from Brian when I can’t do it alone).

I am excellent at some of these tasks, good at some, adequate at a handful and I drag myself through just a few, screaming. But every job has things we dislike, and that’s how it goes.

For the record, I’ll say it again. They say when you are self-employed that you are your own boss. I disagree. In effect, every single customer becomes your boss. In effect, you have more bosses… though you can essentially quit one without quitting them all. I have been very lucky in this area, no complaints, but it is NOT as though one can do whatever one wants when one is self employed. People who say that are trying to sell you a book or video, or something that benefits them, not you. They are cashing in on misconceptions. End of digression.

I love my work, I love my life, I love my job and my everything. Yesterday I went to a music party and took knitting along. It was actually frivolous knitting, a pattern written by someone else, just for me to wear. I have not done this sort of knitting yet in 2008, but it was still observed that I took my “work” to a party. I often do that, but in many cases it is because I work at the thing I would rather do than anything else.

I love to dance, I love to sing, but I would rather knit than either sing or dance. I live a charmed life in that way.

Today, however, is a day with no obligations. Brian has gone off on a bicycle ride and he will be gone until dusk. I am alone in the house, with Jen Sygit on the CD player to keep me company. I bound off the front of my cute frivolous summer top and will cast on the back shortly. And just plain do not much of anything important.

If the neighborhood stays relatively quiet, I will knit on the porch in my beloved Mexican hammock. Right now I’m typing this with the laptop on my lap, feet propped up sideways on the couch with the door wide open.

I have important things to do again soon. I may even do them tomorrow which is officially the holiday. But I will take my holiday today. I will try to live hand in hand with selfishness of a self-nurturing sort.

I will be creatively lazy. On the last day of August. Sigh. Summer is my friend and she is slowly pulling herself away. I will hold her hand for the day, at least.

Photos: 1) My hammock/porch a few years back, it still looks the same. 2) A huge bug I found on a tiny flower in our yard several weeks ago, the one flower in the middle of the yard with no other plants near it. This bug left and came back to the same leaf on a different day. He looked like he had lobster claws in front or something! I was told it was a cicada. There are a few cicadas making some noise today on my block, I wonder if one is this guy? 3) Same plant this week, blooming with fuzzy and bulbous bits in a light orchid color (I had remembered it purple, maybe the stems hinted at that color). What plant is this???

I am learning about myself a bit this summer. I’ve had to make some purchasing decisions. Nothing like the prospect of letting go of hard-to-get cash, to really think hard about what I value most.

As I make choices this year, I’m remembering that many things I’ve loved owning over the years, were single-purpose, no-frills items. I often called my 1985 VW Golf “a driving appliance.” She (I named her Martha G.) had an FM radio, not a cassette, no cruise, and for at least 10 years it did not have air conditioning.

She was totally dependable, never stopped on the side of the road for her first 13 years. Got 35mpg for 10-11 years. Put about 250,000 miles on the odometer. Never, ever let me down in a timeframe that would have beat up most fancier vehicles. That is just one example of a plain-jane thing that I absolutely loved the whole time I had it.

The purchase I had to make most recently, was to replace my only-one-year-old cell phone. Two weeks ago, Rae and I went to Allegan for Michigan Fiber Festival. We went to dinner and I dropped my cell phone in the parking lot. A customer found it the next day but not before someone had stepped on the inside screen and rendered it unuseable.

Fortunately, the restaurant called me (thanks to the address label with PO Box and email addy I had put on the back) and they sent me back my phone. I was able to have my phone numbers transferred to a new phone by Verizon when I got the new one. So even though I could not use the phone if I needed to see the screen, it was alive enough to give me my phone numbers. I’m very grateful.

But which new phone did I get? I could have replaced it with the same model. There would be no learning curve for the replacement, I guess, but I never liked it.

That phone had a camera (I used it a few times but never took the pictures off the phone in a full year). It had an MP3 player (never even considered using it). I believe I could have downloaded games and music to that phone, nothing I wanted.

It had an awful voice recognition system (new technology but bad implementation), so bad that I gave up and went back to speed dial numbers. I had liked the older-style voice recognition I had used on my previous phone. And maybe most irritating, the “down” button was too close to the button below it and caused entry errors too often.

What did I like about the LG? The color. It’s the silver-purple of my first VAIO laptop. That is not enough for me.

If I could get another phone like the Nokia I replaced last year, I would do it in a heartbeat. Its battery was good, I dropped it more often than I like to admit without a problem. I loved the voice dialing, and it did not weigh that much for all the goodness in it.

In the end I woke up and thought, hey, I’ll get something different than this un-loveable LG. I did some comparison shopping online and determined that there are not many phones on the market that are universally loved.

I decided to get the simplest one possible. At least people reviewing it who said they wanted a basic phone and nothing else, loved it for its simplicity and long battery life. Of course, they did not carry that one at the Verizon store… so I had to order it online.

Now, there are also some very scathing reviews of the phone I chose, online. These reviewers are dumbfounded that there is no camera, MP3 player, and that the styling is plain (I call it clean lines). They hate the antenna (which does help with call clarity if you ask me).

One person said it looked like 1999 (my phone in 1999 was heavy and big, just smaller than the handset of a home phone). Another said 2004 or so. My 2004 phone I still love better than any I’ve ever had, but the buttons wore out last year after pushing them so many times. I just need a phone, not an entertainment center!

The phone I got, which I had to order online and have mailed to me, turns out to be just exactly my cup of tea. It is a phone. Just a phone. No camera. No music. No games.

It has clean lines, not fat and chunky like the “cool” LG I just let go of. It does have an alarm clock which I do use. It has speed dial. And the battery lasted more than a week from one charge, even with 65 talk minutes. I’m sold.

Simple can be best. I’m starting to understand myself more now.

Disclaimer: Someone out there surely has the LG phone I’m talking about, and loves it. I’m sure of it. But this story is about me, and how I am still learning about what I am like at 49 years of age. I’m really happy for anyone who likes what they purchased, believe me!

Photos: My ‘85 Golf, whose name was Martha G., in the only photo I can find of her right now; broken LG. My most recent 3 phones: a Nokia I still love, an LG I never bonded with, and the cheapest phone Verizon offers on their website, with their own label on it. The Nokia and LG were decorated with fabric paint in case I needed to remove it for warranty work, it scrapes off with a fingernail but stays on for years. The Verizon has stickers instead, I guess it was faster. If your phone is decorated and someone walks off with it, it’s pretty clear the phone isn’t theirs, you know?

(I totally recommend putting an address sticker with email address or home phone number on your phone, by the way… I put one on my keychain, too. PO Box address, not street address… and a cell phone number can get your keys back in a jiffy. I have experienced this personally. I’d guess a cell phone number on the cell phone would be of limited use, however!)

I love summer, I love heat more than anyone I know… and am getting a little blue seeing nights cool off. We are supposed to have four warm days in a row, including Friday which just passed. This should be great news. But I woke up Friday with a headache. The kind that makes you want to shave your head, because maybe the weight of your hair is making it worse.

Somehow the allergy stuff in the air has changed in the last week and my body has to get used to the new breathing load. Ugh. It’s not a migraine, just sinus anger, and it will calm down soon enough. For now I’m all about Excedrin and vitamin C.

At the same time, I am doing a project for my mom which is just lasting longer than anyone imagined. Getting started was the hardest part and now it’s plugging along, slowly but plugging. Poor mom is eager to have the project in her hands, like a teen sitting by the phone waiting for a beau to call. And I’d be the same way if I were her. So I’m just plugging along, headache or not.

I have only 2 appointments this weekend and both are Saturday. Both involve knitters I love. One involves musicians, too. This could be good. It will be better if I can get mom a draft copy of her project before I disappear for most of the day…

…so for now, it’s back to Mom’s project until I can’t keep my eyes open any longer. The project is starting to really get moving and I can not afford to slow the momentum that has finally started building… send good vibes.

Today is the 45th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech in Washington DC. According to Wikipedia, he spoke to over 200,000 people that day.

Some things have become better, some areas continue to struggle. Fortunately, humankind will always strive for improvement. We will always believe that ideal is attainable and we will continue to work toward that.

We can not afford to get down because things are *not* ideal. Truly, perfect does not exist. The idea of perfection can keep us striving for excellence, however.

I don’t travel often, but when I do it changes my inner life. I went to Africa for 38 days (Ethiopia, Kenya and Egypt) with my friend Altu in 2004-05 and I will never be the same. I have also visited Mexico three times.

I tell you what, the further you go, the more different a place is than home, the more you realize that we are all the same in many ways. We all want our kids to be safe, healthy and happy. We want to feel that things are going to get better. Yes, we have different ways of handling daily life, routines, and rituals. But we are all in the end very human, first of all.

Dr. King, thank you for your inspiration. Just remembering your speech keeps you very much alive and active in our world. I also dream…

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

One day in July, Brian and I went on a road trip to Ohio to sing for a wedding. On that day, we saw two beautiful old cars worth photographing. The first belonged to the groom:

A Cutlass 442 from the mid-70’s. I remember a guy at my high school who tried to impress me with showing up at my house in his brother’s 442. (I graduated in ‘76 so this was probably ‘75 or ‘76.)

I was not very big on cars at the time, and did not get how cool it was. Mind you, I drove a ‘75 red AMC Gremlin and I thought *that* was very cool. It was small for the time, and it was colorful and cute. The 442 was white, yawn!

That guy went on to date a friend of mine. The cars remain cool, and now I understand.

OK, back to the Sunday wedding drive. On the way back home, we stopped in Ann Arbor for dinner at Zingerman’s Deli. I met reader Tessie who works there. She came up to me while I was in line for a cup of tea, and said “I know you but you don’t know me.” What a cool way to say hello! She totally made my day.

And on the way out of Zingerman’s, we passed by this lovely little machine:

It had wood in the dash, a lovely little zooming gizmo on wheels. My mom had a Chevy Corvair with similar curves in the back, probably a few years later than this and not at all as fancy. Why is it I remember things that are now considered classic? I’m still merely 49 years old, for a few more months.

In any case, the pretty cars did make the day more fun. The relationship stuff was better than that, between the wedding reception where we were much appreciated, and the simple act of meeting Tessie who reads this column. What a great day it was!

I did it. I made the desk be a place for computing again.

Since I was so sick for a month (where I could not sit up or stand for more than a short while), I have been using the couch, the kitchen table and the porch as workspaces. Actually, if I’m just typing I love the couch. However, right now I need my scanner and backup drives and a few other goodies. It was time to make it happen.

To be honest, there are three piles of paper on the floor now that were not there. I cleared off a bunch of things on the desk a week or two ago but did not get to the bottom. At this point, I do not have time to work through to the bottom of these piles. Other work is more important.

Therefore, I got the desk surface happy and drivers installed for this or that gizmo that plugs in to the computer. I started scanning again; I had lost use of the machine I’ve used for scanning, because of a worn out power supply, until a few days ago).

In the last several months I have rearranged my technical tools a lot. I bought machines (tiny laptop and phone plus USB storage), parts (power supply) and software (MS Office 2003). I’m getting to the end of my office-organizing period, I think. I hope. I need to be fully in the middle of the office-using period.

Meanwhile I need to wake up at an hour more like normal people tomorrow. I have to dance with the Habibi Dancers for a cultural diversity day at Sparrow Hospital. This will be my third year doing this engagement, and it is much fun.

After that I will be able to just go back to my desk and pick up where I left off on the scanning tonight. This is the life.