And The Year Winds Down

Weird.  I was looking at the list of my posts and noticed that this one was still labeled "draft."  So although I wrote it in December I'm just now posting it.  Better late than never?  (Now that I've reread it I think it's because I stopped to take a picture of the finished project and never came back)

I was thinking about trying to catch up with 2018 before 2019 started--but that's two days to do 11 months so might not happen.  And it's really hard to remember what you did in a year.  As well as getting out of the habit of writing, I also got out of the habit of taking pictures.

So I looked back at my last post for 2017--with not so much resolutions as goals.  Some of them remain untouched--but glory be!  We did one!  The Den!

Some people are house proud.  They design their houses, choose the right furnishings and accessories, have a home they can show off.  Bob and I tend more to just sort of camping out, using whatever happens to be handy.  Over the last few years we've been making some improvements (like getting new countertops in the kitchen and painting the cabinets. and dumping the junk in front of the barn and putting in the carport).  The den had sort of random furniture shoved in willy-nilly--much of it Walmart pressboard which was supposed to be temporary but became permanent (because, honestly, entertainment centers don't excite me enough to spend a couple of thousand dollars on one).  Our shelf of DVDs and CDs had been on a shelf above the TV--then when we got the big screen they sort of became *behind* it and to find one you had to get a footstool so you could look over the top of the TV.

In the back corner there was the so-called "vet center" where anything animal-related and a lot of things not animal related piled up.  To get to it you had to squeeze behind a chair.

No, there are no "before" pictures.  I don't want to admit that a couple in their sixties live like frat boys.

First, as always, came the culling.  I wrote quite a bit about that last year, and it continues.  One just tends to gather things over the decades and then it's so much work to go through the pile.  But we did.  We have a lot of first-aid gear--but I decided that between us we have four arms so we don't need any more arm slings than that.  I have only one right wrist that acts up sometime so how did I get three braces?  It's just such a slog, but we slogged on.

Other things were harder--sentimental.  We don't even have a record player anymore, and we really don't listen to music that much, but we still had about four shelf feet of records. Moody Blues from high school.  60's rock.  A Nutcracker Suite that was my favorite Christmas record when I was a kid. The problem with things like that is that you really can't bring yourself to toss them in a dumpster.  And hey!  Some of them might be valuable.  Those we finally bundled up and took to Vinyl Fever (a vintage record store) and told them to take them.  Flush with success, we did the same thing to our weeded-out DVDs (those went to a video lounge).

In the meantime, we looked at entertainment centers.  Meh.  Then one day we were in Home Depot and this was on a deep discount sale:

I don't know who called whose bluff, but there's our new TV stand.  It's the right height, it's got a ton of storage, and it ever has a power strip for charging our various devices.

After that, the rest fell into place.  I had told Bob that if I could have the corner where the vet center had been for my spinning supplies, he could have its previous spot for a new gun safe.  With those two in place, we could then build some shelving (black pipe, keeping with what seems to be an industrial theme, with burned wood shelves) complete with a bespoke niche for a spinning wheel.

Oh--and I got bored with the plain white lampshades in that room and steampunked them:

The finished lineup:

And yes, we kept one section at the end of the shelf clear because there is usually a cat on it.  We bow to the inevitable.

So one goal for 2018 at least was met.  The rest?  To be continued . . .

Another One Bites the Dust

I do my best (and actually usually succeed) to take a daily walk around our property.  I worked it out that three laps around equals a mile (I have no idea if it really does.  I just counted the number of steps to walk around and calculated at 30 inches per step, so maybe.  Does it matter, as long as I get outside and walk?)

This daily walk was disrupted by Hurricane Michael (aka The Storm).  I literally could not find the path because everything was knee-deep in what used to be the tree canopy, and there were trees down over much of it.  Three months later, we got the last loop of the path cleared.

Until last week, when another tree hit the ground.

We've been keeping an eye on it.  It was in a group of 3-4 trees that came down behind the house, still sort of upright but leaning.  The lean was parallel to the house, so it wouldn't hit if it came down, and with the tangle of other trees it would have been too dangerous for the tree guys to try to take it down.

The root end of the group of trees.

  The one that just fell is the one going across the picture

--the root ball is hidden in the underbrush

So we just let it stay there.  But recently it started popping and cracking and slipping a bit.  Then one night I went outside to call for one of the cats.  With a sound and feeling hard to describe--cracking and rending and swooshing  (picture the old Batman sounds--BAM!  SWOOSH!  THUD!)  it came down.  I was about 20 feet away and could feel it hit the ground.  I yelled--I like to think I was using colorful language, but I just wasn't that coherent.  It was like all that energy had to be released from me somehow.  We paced the tree out--over 100 feet tall.  That's a lot of power when it comes down.

We wondered why it fell when it did.  For once, we haven't had much rain.  Or wind.  It takes a lot of force to drop a tree.  What could have caused it?

The answer:  Life.  Spring comes early in the south.  Although about half the rootball of this tree was pulled up, the other half was still in the ground.  The tree doesn't know that it's, well, dead.  So it's budding out.

That's hundreds of gallons of water being sent out to the tips of the branches (as I said, this was a *big* tree).  Enough to tip it over.

It's sort of philosophically sad.  The attempt to continue to live is what finished it off.  But who knows?  We're going to (very carefully) cut back the branches that are in the way, but leave the others alone.  We might end up with a leafy arch over my path.  Life finds a way.

Neil Gaimen's Handwriting

I like journals; at least, I like the *idea* of journals.  I collect notebooks--and then I don't ever write in them because I have lousy handwriting and I don't have particularly deep or pithy thoughts and it seems a shame to mess them up.

I've started at lot--but then they go by the wayside.  Except for my first blog that lasted for something like 7 years before I loss access to write in it.  Maybe it's because a blog doesn't mess up the paper or depend on my handwriting.

Maybe it's because I look at examples of other people's journals.  Even the currently popular "bullet journal" where you keep track of day-to-day stuff seems a bit fancy.

Examples:

A reading list (some journals have "blank books" so you can write titles as you read them)

Resolutions

The day the dog stole their shoes

Have to admit that I really like the last one.  And you can find sites that tell you how to draw banners and borders and how to mix fonts and sample pages such as coloring in your daily moods.  Sometimes it seems that journaling is about journaling.  And all I want to do is sort our my life, keep track of things (from details on an art project to remembering to make an appointment at the vet).  Just some scrawls.

So the books remain blank.

But I've been reading a lot of Neil Gaiman lately.  Often, at the beginning of his books, he tells you a bit about the craft of writing, what inspired him, where he wrote it.  What really comes through is that writers write.  That may seem obvious--but it doesn't mean that they sit down and write a novel (or a poem, or a short story).  It means that they write *all the time*.  Whether inspired or not.  Words have to go down on paper, and eventually, if you're lucky, they turn into something.  And a lot of writers actually write--pen on paper (the Harry Potter books were written by hand in a coffee shop).  Gaiman often writes by hand (he likes using a fountain pen).  One of his books--Coraline--had a sample of his notes and rough draft.  And I stared at it for awhile:

Because that's not great handwriting.  No banners.  No flowers (OK--there's a sketch).  It eventually became a book which became a movie.

I don't know what I'm going to do with this epiphany.  But maybe I'll mess up some of those notebooks.