Fifty-two do-overs

Monday - life's start-again day. Whether you've trashed your house or crashed your diet over the weekend, stayed out too late, maybe drank one more glass of wine than you meant to - whatever - when Monday comes around you get back on track. Mondays are like having a New Year's Day once a week.

Except for the absolute minimum required to keep body and soul together, I did nothing last week but work on a music project, letting all else fall down around my ears. I finished the score, wrestling as always with the music-writing software, printed it out and mailed it off Saturday. I plowed through Sunday, which often starts too early and usually gets me home around time to collapse and watch "60 Minutes." Yesterday, Monday, I set about what my friend Karen terms "exerting control over my domestic environment."

The underwear alarm went off so I really had to do laundry. I seem to have a lot of laundry. I can't decide if this means I'm a very clean person or a very grubby one. I do know that every time I'm just about done with the laundry I do something rash - like get out a clean towel or change my socks - and before I even get the last load of the day folded and put away, I already have the beginnings of the next pile of laundry. It makes me think of that sour dough starter some people use to make bread; they always save a bit to start the next batch.

Cleaning up the rest of the house was - still is - a bit like mucking out the Aegean stables. The Squalor Alert Level had been hovering around orange, threatening to escalate to red in some corners of the house. I'm progressing toward yellow, aiming to bring it down around green by tomorrow . . . well, maybe Thursday. There's no hope of ever reaching the all-clear blue zone. I may be a nut case, but I'm a realistic one. My office always looks as if somebody has picked it up and shaken it.

I still haven't washed the kitchen floor or cleaned the stove, and I have a bunch of recycling to drop off, but I seem to have done enough to keep the Health Department (or the TSA) from showing up at my door. At least for now, I can live with that.

Falling into a book

I have fallen in love again. Last week it was a tree, a modest young river birch with curls of creamy bark. I visited it at least once a day, took photos of it, watched it in the rain. This week, or at least today, it is a book, though sometimes it is music or the rainbows on my wall. (I am easily amused.)
One week driving back and forth to the other side of town for a school residency, it was a song by the Wailin' Jennies. I played the track, singing along to add an additional harmony that is, to my ear, absolutely essential, then pushed the 'back' button on the CD player to do it over again. For ten 40" trips between home and school, I lived in that song.
Now, as I said, it is a book,  The Memory Palace, by Mira Bartok. A memoir of life as the daughter of a schizophrenic, it is sometimes dark but never dreary, and written in such luminous language that I cannot stop reading it. I read last night until I fell asleep and picked it up again when I woke, still in my pajamas when a friend stops at 10am. I am living in this book instead of writing or cleaning or seeing to the laundry or other chores. I cannot wait to finish this book and I never want it to end. So it goes.

Walking on water

Forget that lion and lamb stuff - this March flew in like a puddle-loving duck and toddled away in weather only a penguin could love. Now April, my yard is again afloat and falling temps tonight could lay a thin lid of ice on my pond. Oh - and then we are expecting rain every day for the rest of the week.
Besides the pond, which is supposed to be there, I have a great lake wannabe under the mulberry tree and a growing body of muddy water near the patio behind the garage. I'm expecting migrating geese to land any time now. My plan is to declare my back garden a wetlands and apply for a Federal grant. After that, all I need is signage.
Shopping for a pontoon boat,
Jancy

The Question Was, Where Have You Been?

New York, Chicago, Columbus, Ohio
dozens of places that seem
like a good idea at the time.

well, that's the beginning of an old answer (to read the whole poem, click on http://www.switched-ongutenberg.org/archive/vol5no1/where.htm)

As for more recently, the answer is here, there and Puerto Rico. (More on that later.) Not a post to be seen since the first of the year, and one quarter of the year gone.
Resolving on this first of April to do better, JanC

New Year's Forecast

The morning of Jan. 1 will bring a 74% chance of hangovers in many locations, followed by intermittent flurries of regrets, changing to resolutions by evening. Expect drifts of pork and sauerkraut over the Midwest, with pop-up showers of hoppin'john in the southern states. 2011 calendars and day planners may appear by sunset. Across the country, football will remain steady throughout the day.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Jingle-bell Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree

I know it’s a little late to be bringing this up – so-called “holiday music” has been in the air non-stop since before Halloween. And I didn’t want just to complain about it. After all, we have Andy Rooney to do that. Plus, the past couple of weeks I’ve been preoccupied with committing random acts of coughing so I am kind of in catch-up mode here.

Patriotism aside, I am not much of a shopper. I don’t hang out at the mall. I long ago stopped buying things for the kids in my extended family, preferring instead to blow my gift budget on experiences. You know, tickets to the Nutcracker, a train ride with Santa and so on. (This year in a moment of questionable sanity, I forked over an amount roughly equivalent to the GDP of a developing nation to take a small boy to see the Harlem Globetrotters. Love makes fools of us all.)

Nevertheless, I do step into a retail establishment from time to time. Even the Grinch has to buy groceries or pick up something at the drug store now and then. And for nearly one quarter of the year, when I step into said retail establishment, I am treated, as are we all, to “holiday music.”

Now, I’m not going to go on about the questionable content of “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer,” or vent about the tasteless trashing of true Christmas classics by pop stars who either belt loud enough to wake the poor babe in the manger or slide all over a tune as if it’s been sprayed with PAM. And I’m certainly not going to tell you my fantasies of sneaking a bit of rat poison into Rudolph’s feed bag or taking the Little Drummer Boy out with an automatic weapon. (Rat-a-tat-tat - do you hear what I hear?!)

No, my issue with this ubiquitous sound-track has to do with audience. For whom is this twelve-week long Holly Jolly Christmas being played? This inquiring mind really wants to know. Every person I asked about it either said she loathes the stuff, or claimed she simply doesn’t hear it anymore. OK, I admit mine was a thoroughly unscientific and very limited study – perhaps a dozen people, some of whom were at work in these retail establishments when we chatted. (Their response BTW was invariably the latter.)

So, back to the question - why is this stuff playing? If everybody either hates being pelted for weeks on end with bad renditions of Winter Wonderland or completely tunes it all out, what, I ask you, what is the point?

Help me, please.

Still Holiday Not-Shopping

This week’s Sunday paper included fully half as many ad supplements as the Thanksgiving Day behemoth. As I’ve said, I’ve already not bought everything I don’t need for the holidays. In fact, I was completely done not shopping a week ago. So I didn’t read any of them except, of course, the Target one. I’m still concerned about that little dog with the red circles around his eye. Is that stage makeup? Grease paint? I hope it’s nontoxic and hypoallergenic.

            Most of the slick supplements that show up with my paper are big box fliers, ads from national chains and department stores, stuffers that might just as likely be included in your Miami Herald, Minneapolis Sun or LA Times. My sister in North Carolina gets all of these with her paper, too, but she also received a catalog from a fancy food emporium near where she lives.

I know this store, and I’m pretty sure that its holiday selection includes a lot of fruit baskets, wine and/or cheese assortments, weighty pastries that no one would consider giving or eating any other time of the year, and possibly a sausage-of-the-month club. But I’m only guessing.

There was just one item that my sister considered noteworthy enough to share with me via email. It’s a butter sculpture of a Christmas tree, made of  (quoting here) “Certified AA kosher butter.” A Christmas tree made of kosher butter. Are we the only ones who find that a mite humorous?

A kosher butter Christmas tree. Really. Of course, it’s strictly a gift item. There are some things no one would ever buy for herself. I’m going to have to talk to my sister about this. Maybe we’ll both order it . . . and give it to each other.