The Day After Earth Day

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day and much was said about it in the news. I deliberately watched part of Oprah, something that I don't normally do.

The sight of the Pacific Garbage Gyre was ghastly and disgusting. I have been recycling for years, sometimes grudgingly, I admit, because of the time that it takes to sort everything into separate bags and bins. Sometimes, I am tempted to just pitch it. Lately I have been more careful. The clutter that it makes in the house to have more sorting stations is one my annoyances with recycling. (Not that my house is pristine, in any case.) I think I will learn to live with the annoyance.

I have resisted reusing plastic bags until this year, figuring that it uses water and soap to wash them. I do re-use one bag for dry things over and over until the crumbs get too crumby or there is too much build-up of flour or almond meal or whatever I am putting in its "store" bag into my zippered bag. Switching to cloth bags would not work well, since the contents would not be visible. Switching to hard containers might help but they would be more awkward to handle.

This winter I have saved my plastic bags and now that the weather is warming a bit, I am washing and drying them. Trying to swish the soapy water from one to the next to conserve it is messy, but somehow satisfying. Turning the bag inside out to rinse the interior takes less water--and time--than filling and pouring, especially when I remember to turn the faucet off while I turn. So perhaps it doesn't waste too much water.

I started saving the bags because of the cost. Now I will think of the Garbage Gyres--all five of them, the one I knew about and the other four as I do so. I do think that the problem isn't just re-use and recycle, though. I think it is more fundamental than that.

We need to pick up after ourselves. Dispose of things properly instead of just casting them aside. (I suppose that is recycling, really.) Plastic bottles and bags didn't exist when I was a child. They can be re-used and then recycled to make other things.

That was part of Earth Day coverage too. The things made with plastic bottles. A boat named "Plastiki"; a school in Guatamala. Knitters have used strips of plastic bags for knitting sturdy totes for sometime, although that was not mentioned. I love the fleece fabrics made from recycled plastic bottles. Turning trash into treasure.

We also do need to use less. According to World News last night Americans are consuming less than we did forty years ago. About fifty percent less. But is that because of recycling or merely a result of the recession?

A few years ago, I was pretty cynical about Earth Day, "green solutions" because it seemed as though new companies were simply being started to make the same items that we probably need to use less only out of "green" materials and manufacturing processes.

What if we went back to using thermoses for our coffee and tea? Brought our sandwiches from home in wax paper or re-usable containers, ate in sit down restaurants with re-usable instead of disposable plates and utensils? Turning the clock back to the fifties, I guess, and that is not possible.

While I still refuse to subscribe to the pseudo-religious aspects of recycling, I will grumble less, organize a little more and think of that whale that was beached--dead with plastic items and a golf ball in it's stomach. Not a very good diet for any creature on our small planet.

I am grateful for ways to make my imprint on our planet lighter. Stewardship of the earth is, after all, a way to practice the virtue of humility and any practice of virtue is a good thing.

Blue Iris

Another flower that was truly spectacular in my garden yesterday was a pale blue Iris. These flowers are almost a bouquet in themselves and put on such a show! I have been trying to take the "perfect" Iris photo for about five years now and am nowhere close, but hope to live long enough to persevere some more. I have put a few of my shots on cards and will undoubtedly make some more.

The light yesterday was somewhat flat and dull, as rain clouds gathered. The color of the flowers was more uniform as a result. I would like to try again with bright light to see if the petals are translucent, but that light might just wash out for the camera.

Here are the photos.











The poppies have not "popped" yet and the roses in the backyard are blooming from the top down, but too far away for me to photograph them.

I am grateful for the garden and the camera.

Today's Garden

Today as I opened the front door to put something out for the mailman, I spotted the first big red rose of the year. Up high and so beautiful. It is now on my kitchen counter. It does not seem to have the perfume that earlier roses have had--I think it is telling me to feed it.



It drew me back, camera at the ready and garden scissors tucked into my pocket, as surely as if it were calling to me. I took the first photo to document it in place. The second is close-up indoors.



Finally, a close-up on the kitchen counter.



Next I noticed the purple shamrock--oxalis.



Another



and finally



The purple leaves amaze and delight me, since I grew up thinking that leaves should be green.

Last, just because it is so happy there is the "regular" shamrock--green leaves with white flowers.



For a plant that came home from the grocery store several years ago, it's not doing too badly. An amaryllis that was about to flower probably won't, since it has been seriously chewed.

Still, I am grateful for things that are blooming and for the chance to poke my nose out into fresh air and some sunshine before the gathering clouds bring rain tomorrow and keep me indoors. Happy Spring!

Biggest Strawberries Ever

Friday, my friend who joins me for lunch on Fridays, brought these giant berries. We meant to weight them as well as take their pictures, but got caught up in conversation.




Each of them was equal to four or five ordinary berries. What was truly amazing was that they were delicious and juicy.

Today was a day of true rain, not drizzles but downpours. Perhaps the drought really is truly over.

I am grateful for these remarkable berries and for the rain. Most especially grateful for my friend who shares lunch with me weekly. We have known each other since we were in our twenties--longer now than we have not known each other and he is truly my brother in spirit. Grateful tonight for life.

Easter Roses

As the first week of Easter progresses, I am celebrating with roses roses brought by a friend. My own rose bushes have buds, so I know there will be flowers soon. (High up on the backyard bush the first roses are blooming.)









There is a sweet, faint odor of roses in the dining room that proclaims Spring is here! I have truly the worst case of cabin fever/spring fever that I have had in years. (I almost typed Spring fervor, and I think that would be a fortuitous typo. It has been cold, dank and dreary for too long--even though we did need the rain.)

I am grateful for Spring and for roses.

Easter Flowers

It is hard to believe that it is already Holy Week. Perhaps the return of winter weather after sufficient sunshine and warmth over the past weekend add to my disbelief! (I am ready to be warm again!)

My friend C, with whom I share coffee most Monday afternoons, brought me a gift of orchids from her yard this week. They are one of the most stunning plants I have ever seen. She said that they are lymbidiums. Here they are







At the same time, she also cut two of my Iris, which are just beginning to bloom. Not as big as last year's flowers, they are still pretty.



While they are not typical Easter flowers it is good to have something fresh blooming in the house for Holy Week.

Tonight the choir will sing Tenebrae, tomorrow Holy Thursday and then Good Friday. Saturday, the Easter Vigil, and then Sunday. I remember snippets from each service, which I have not been able to attend for many years. EWTN will give me the services from the Vatican, if I can just remember to look up the schedule. Wishing seriously for podcasts here, and I suppose that I should go look for some!

I am grateful for the time that I spent singing this music when I was young, for it shaped so much of who I am and my adult life. Very grateful too, for my friend who brought flowers and for other friends who brought palms on Palm Sunday.

St Patrick's Day, 2010

The day is being celebrated here with Irish Soda Bread, thanks to a friend, who thought of me when she went shopping. I do wish that bakeries would have it year round; it being one of my favorite things.

In addition, I made Chocolate Stout Cupcakes Sunday and they carry the theme and taste of Guinness. No green beer here, thank you!

Over twenty years ago I bought this lovely set of Irish dolls at our church bazaar. I do not know the name of the person who made them, so cannot credit the artist, but I do dearly love them and think of that time as well as my Irish roots when I look at them. This year I finally made time to take some pictures. Here they are.



A happy and blessed day to you all! I am grateful for my Irish ancestors today.

Connections

Today spring shone through. The day was delightful, friends came visiting I got a minimal amount of work done. It is time to fit writing into the schedule again, but before I do that I have been indulging in playing on Facebook. In the process of seeing what friends are doing, I discovered a fantastic blog, The Lighthouse Keeper. The writer, a friend from my graduate school days, who is choosing to be anonymous in her blog, writes of an ancestor who was the last lighthouse keeper in Sandusky, Ohio. Sandusky is not too far from Toledo, where I grew up and where family and friends still live.

It is beautifully written, this blog that gives me dual connections--to the area that I grew up in and to a friend whom I haven't seen in so many years and whom I had lost touch with until the Internet brought us together again.

I love the powerful connections of history, having majored in the subject myself in college so many years ago that I can now properly speak of decades ago. My friend writes powerfully of history, research and genealogy--of connections. I highly recommend this blog. She has a compelling voice, one that I hope will be in print. It is thrilling to read such beautiful and powerful writing and know that I know the person behind it.

I am grateful today for pausing to read. Her blog is noted in my blog links to the right. I highly recommend it.

Sunshine and Pictures

Today the sun shone long enough to take decent pictures. First I took the baby sachet that I kept when I sent the package off to my sister earlier in the week. Here it is.



My sister called just as I was beginning to write this post and she was so excited that her package arrived today! (I love priority mail.) We have a ritual that when I send a package, she opens it while we talk on the phone. I could hear her excitement and feel it too! She loved the sachets.

The last picture that I took was of these white and purple mitts. I can even type with them on my hands.



Several years ago I was experimenting with making triangle scarves and seeing how much I could make with one skein. For some reason, I made two of these in ribbing, which made them long and narrow and not very useful as scarves. They sat and were about to hit a give away bag a few weeks ago when I thought, "Wait a minute, the yarn is perfectly good and it is one of my favorite discontinued yarns." (Lion Brand, Wool Ease, Sport Weight) I had discovered that I particularly liked to combine two strands for a tweedy effect. So these mitts or wristers quickly materialized.

I am so grateful that the package reached Toledo safely and that the sachets are so pretty and so well-loved. Grateful for today's sunshine, too. More rain is on the way.

Roses in the Midst of Winter

Not really the midst of winter, but the end--and in my part of the country, from a weather calendar viewpoint it is already spring, but today my house smelled beautifully of roses.

Some months ago, my sister sent me a bag of flowers from her garden. A preponderance of gorgeous, dark red roses along with pansies and a few black-eyed Susans along with other roses. She had carefully dried them, for like me, she can't bear to throw them out. Then the problem was what to do with them. I suggested she send them to me and I would add them to my potpourri ingredients.

In a few weeks she will be giving a baby shower for her second grandchild (first granddaughter) so she commissioned me to make her a sachet for the favor for the guests to take home. Using her flowers was a natural!

In addition, I have accumulated a nice supply of herbs that have meanings appropriate to wishing the young lady well and oils to enhance the fragrances of the flowers and bring them back to their summer glory. Tea rose, old rose and rose garden fragrance oils joined violet and honeysuckle and finally a dash of clove and a liberal amount of patchouli.

The flowers, mixed with the oils nearly fill one bag and the herbs that I mixed on Sunday partially fill another. The dining room smells of roses and so do I, for at one point I wiped oil off my hands unto my clothes. I expect to dream of roses tonight. (Pictures will follow in another post. The light was too gloomy today to take good pictures.)

The library volunteer brought me two Mary Stewart novels, which I am sure that I read in my youth. I am enjoying This Rough Magic and just read all about the fabulous old rose garden in the early part of the book before I fell asleep last night. I dream of such a garden. When I first read the book forty or so years ago, I did not recognize the names of any of the roses. Now, after having a passion for gardening for the last twenty or so years, I do. (My passion is usually as an armchair gardener, but there was a time when I read gardening books as avidly as novels.)

The search for the fragrance oils led me to the website of the Rosemary House, an almost legendary herb business, that I bought many of my supplies from when I had an herbal craft business some twenty years ago. It is good to see they are still there and to be connected again.

I am grateful tonight for the rain that we have been blessed with in abundance this week, for the delightful fragrance of roses filling my house, for my sister's sweet generosity as she draws me in to be included in a family activity that I am too far away from and for the connection to a business that I had so long ago. Grateful too to be reviving my own.

Grateful for Being Where I Am

It rained a good deal this week in my part of the world and all of us who live here are glad. We need the water. It is still snowing in the mountains and that is good too. Good for the people who live there and need the snow to attract the skiers. Good for the rest of us who depend on that snowpack for our summer water needs. Maybe it will be possible to have a garden this year. I missed my basil and tomato plants last summer. I long to be at least partly food self-sufficient.

As I watched the news reports of snow in the East, I was glad that I don't live there. Prayers, especially for all those who have no power. Spring cannot come soon enough, I am sure.

The news report about the humongous earthquake off the coast of Chile, also made be glad that I don't live there either. More prayers. Earthquakes scare the bejabbers out of me. 2010 seems to have had enough already. I start thinking of moving back to Toledo, Ohio--my real hometown, where my family still live, when I get scared about earthquakes.

Transporting about 25,000 pounds of furniture and household stuff 2500 miles would not be a minor task. Since we had 10,000 pounds when we moved out here, the amount is a guesstimate. I keep weeding out things that I don't need, but somehow the weeding isn't going fast enough! If I could just clap my hands together (since I can't click my heels.)

Better, for now at least, to work on being grateful for where I am. Daffodils are blooming. There may be enough water for basil plants. Oatmeal buckwheat muffins sit in the oven waiting to be consumed over the next few days as my bread. (I nearly said "scarfed" instead of consumed. They are so yummy that they do tend to disappear rather quickly.)

My dining room is full of the lovely smell of herbs since I "booked in" some of the new herbs that came this week. More to do tomorrow. This consists of emptying each bag into a big aluminum bowl and then measuring the contents back into the bag it came in to see how many cups each bag contains. The herbs are sold by weight. I concoct my potpourris by measure. Having the measure is essential, both to know how much I can make before I will need to buy more, as well as the all important cost factor that is at the foundation of every small business and pricing decision.

I am grateful to be where I am tonight and hope that tomorrow will be a good day. Prayers for healing and sustenance go out to all those in danger from the weather. Prayers always go out for my family and friends. Thank you to you all, those who read my blog, those who befriend me.

Reflections on Week Just Past

The fragrance of daffodils fresh cut from the yard filled my house with a delicate and delicious perfume. I think of the neighbor who shared the King Alfred bulbs with me when she bought a huge bag from Costco one year. She is gone, but her memory lingers in the beauty of the daffodils and in the knowledge that I gained from her sharing. They are fragrant, even being grown especially for the perfume industry and they are an ancient symbol of the Resurrection.


The photo shows some of the daffodils as they appear outside this year. It has either been too wet or too murky to take good pictures this year, so they will not be as well documented as they have in the past.

The next day the heady fragrance of lavender filled my dining room while I worked on lavender sachets and dream pillows for my herbal craft business. More about that after the items are posted on Etsy. The lavender did not quite overpower the daffodils, but they did not exactly blend either. Probably not compatible ingredients for the same perfume or potpourri.

Monday saw a furry visitor to my Pyracantha as well. One squirrel firmly planted herself and ate and ate and ate of the red berries. The next day robins filled the bush. The squirrel slipped in at the back and later a squirrel (perhaps the same one) appeared in the rose bush eating the rose hips. Poor baby, there are almost no berries left now and the robins, after stripping the bushes, have moved on in their migration.

Tuesday, February 16. would have been Papa's 90th birthday, if he were still alive. I wondered what he would be like if he were still alive. Wiser and just as full of intelligence and humor. A little more wizened too.

Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. This year is going by too quickly already. Time doesn't fly, it flees! Easter is just around the corner.

Thursday my sewing machine and I actually cooperated to get an hour's worth of work done. So often we fight. It was nice to go to it and be able to just do the tasks. Of course, setting it up properly does help! For me, this means reading the book that came with it every time I re-do anything. (Putting the bobbin in and putting the needle in are two of the pitfalls. Threading the needle is another.) Reading the book and checking the diagrams takes so much less time and energy than cussing and screaming, that it is amazing that it took me so long to realize that was the way to go. (Better for the blood pressure too.)

Now it is Saturday already. Time to bake bread and do laundry and clean the kitchen. I am grateful for the show of nature (glad I was inside when all those birds were outside) and grateful for simple weekend chores. If the sun actually shines that will be cause for gratitude too.

Word Should Come with a Warning

Yesterday I spent hours to layout and print four pages in Microsoft word. Two sheets, both sides on business card stock. Word supposedly has a template for this under envelopes and labels. Trouble is, it doesn't work very well. After screaming, yelling, coughing and using quite a bit of creative but very loud swearing I was ready to abandon not only the project but all hope and any attempt to do anything. I wanted comfort food, a hot bath and a novel. I settled for the novel--after finally getting my pages done and broken up into tags. Tomorrow, if all goes well, I will have some pictures of the products.

The warning, "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here", ought to flash on the screen whenever one attempts to do any kind of layout in Word. To be absolutely fair, of course, I am using Office 2000 with WindowsXP. Maybe that is the problem.

I do fairly well with most layout in Publisher. Publisher is looked down upon by my acquaintances in the Desktop publishing world, but it serves most of my needs nicely. It massacres business cards. It too has a template that isn't a template.

At one point, when my frustration level had mounted and my sense of anguish over waste time had risen, I opened Adobe's InDesign and found, as I had in the past, that it simply seems so complicated that I can't navigate it. I tried in Photoshop and then gave that up and went back and finally conquered Word.

I think my next product is going to have to be something that doesn't fit with a business card size tag. Sigh.

Life is complicated! It seems that the more that I try to simplify it, the more complicated I make it. (That could be the underlying problem with Word too.)
My products are coming along nicely. I am recreating a line that I made twenty years ago and I am excited. The new line has variations, of course, and even the variations please me. I will write about this in another post, soon, I hope.

The complication is that the design process doesn't stop with the product, but must include the packaging and labeling. Sometimes this design process can be fun, too, but not when the software, which is supposed to make our lives easier, makes the completion so difficult that much of the creativity is subsumed in exhaustion.

At one moment yesterday, I was just grateful to get the thing done. Grateful to put the new little products in their neat little bags with their pretty tags on business cards. They look nice and professional, the way I want them to.

I am grateful too, for electricity that makes it possible to sit here at my computer with a light on and my space heater running. So many folks have been without power in the blizzards, that I am simply glad to live here and think of them and send up a prayer that they too will be restored to comfort and heat and light--and even to struggling with their computers.

Remembering my Godmother

My godmother, Mary Catherine (Mertes) Walker, died Jan 23, 2010. She was born August 31, 1917. World War I had less than three months to run its course in Armistice in November. She was twelve years old, not quite ready for high school when the stock market crashed in 1929. When it came time for High School, Mary Kate, as she was known throughout her lifetime, attended Notre Dame, the same school that her first-cousin, Helen Rose (Mertes) Manor had attended before her. (Decades later, my niece Jennifer also attended that high school and took great pride in looking up her predecessors in the archives of the school newspaper.)

I seem to remember that Mary Kate took a secretarial course after High School and she was able to find work in spite of the depression and the advent of World War II. Shortly after the war she married Charles Walker, "Charlie" and they settled down to the tasks of raising a family--six children, five girls and one boy.

I remember this family well from my own childhood in Toledo and the time that my sister and I spent several days with them while our parents supervised the loading of all our belongings unto a moving van and the cleaning and closing of our little house prior to our own great trek across the continent in the 1955 Chevy Bel Air sedan that I sold a few years ago to someone who was eager to restore it.

I have been thinking of Mary Kate for the last ten days. How many loads of laundry did it take, hauled up and down flights of stairs to keep a family of eight clean and dressed with towels and bedding to boot? Please remember that in those days most of the clothes and all of the linen--even the kitchen dish towels --needed ironing. (And on Saturdays, my godmother took her turn bringing the church linens she had also found the time to launder to the church where she joined several other women in cleaning the sacristy and setting out the linen for Masses the next day.)

How many pounds of potatoes did she peel and cakes did she bake in the years that it took to raise a family of six children? Not to mention the children and grandchildren. In addition, like the church laundry, there would have also been baking for the church bake sales and cooking for the potlucks, spaghetti dinners and fish frys that every church holds to raise funds. That doesn't include the casseroles delivered to people in the parish when illness or death struck a house.

Over the last decade Mary Kate and I talked on the phone occasionally, not frequently enough. I drew on her deep faith and quiet strength to go forward with my own life. She told me, "If you fall asleep while you are saying your prayers, your guardian Angel finishes them for you." (Does it count if you meant to say your prayers, but fall asleep reading yet another mystery novel from the library, because you have to get them all finished before the library volunteer brings some more?)

Like my father, she never had an unkind word to say about anyone or anything. "If you can't say something good about someone, don't say anything," was a watch word that she lived by. Like my parents, too, she lived the everyday virtue of charity in her kindness, courtesy and service to others.

Last week, partly out of necessity, and partly, I think because I was remembering Mary Kate and my mother too and pondering how much work these women quietly did everyday to make our lives glad, I found myself in a frenzy of "multi-tasking" household chores. One afternoon I had bread in the bread machine (no bread machine in the 1950's), laundry in both the washer and the dryer (no dryer until the mid-1950's) and muffins in the oven. At one point I almost muffed the muffins--forgot they were in the oven and they nearly burned. In between, I washed dishes. Nothing compared to the dishes Mary Kate, with eight people in the house, washed everyday.

By the time I ate my supper that night, I had appetite, felt that I had earned it and savored it, simple as it was. (Tomato soup and muffins.) I thought about housework, including cooking, as I have for the past year or so, as the foundation to the practice of the virtue of humility. Just as kindness and courtesy are the foundation of the virtue of charity.

Most of us are not called upon to practice heroic virtue. Still finding the virtue in homely things may keep us well enough in body and in spirit to live a long and happy life. Saying the rosary every day, (or a comparable practice) as I suspect my godmother did isn't a bad idea either.

I am grateful for the life of my godmother and the lives of my parents and others whom I miss who have gone before me. I miss her and I will continue to miss her along with Mama and Papa. It was a simpler life in someways; I have nostalgia for those long gone days, partly because I was a child then. (Perhaps that is another blog post.) Remembering Mary Kate and my parents will give me the foundation for continuing my own life in this all too modern century that I live in.

Rainy Day Fits and Starts

After three days of storms, complete with thunder and lightening, the rain has tapered off to gentle and dreary. The light in the house is gray and cold, like the weather outside and makes me glad that I live in modern times, with heat and electricity. Put down the blind (battery operated), close the drapes (hand-operated still) and turn on the lights and music. Cozy. So much so that I feel sleepy and sluggish--not at all like writing.

The big grocery store chain that I frequently order groceries from for delivery does not have an ingredient I want to bake with. Almond paste. Neither does the small organic delivery service. (Granted, that was a long shot.) Google tells me that Amazon has almond paste and Amazon itself has marzipan as well. Probably enough for two batches of the cookies that I want to make, one shaped like tiny hearts for Valentine's Day and one like shamrocks for St Patrick's Day.

Trouble is I don't really want to order it shipped. It should be available locally. In the past, I made my marzipan from scratch, first making almond paste from scratch. I know where the book is and I am sure that blanched almonds are available locally, but I don't think I am going to do this from scratch.

Second trouble is that if I buy the marzipan, I am then committing myself to doing this rather elaborate baking. So I will keep thinking about it while I go and do something else.

Friends brought lunch today and that was delightful. (May be part of the reason that I am sleepy, too. It was a biggish lunch.)

The Christmas decorations are almost put away. Another hour of effort and organizing and I would be there with the job all done. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe on Saturday. It's really sounding like a procrastinating sort of a day!

Today is the feast of St. Agnes--one of my patron saints. I was named for my grandmothers, my mother's mother was Agnes Elizabeth. So Agnes is my middle name. Sometimes I have wished that my parents had chosen Elizabeth for my middle name, but that would have been long. Often, I wish I had chosen Rose for my confirmation name because there were so many Roses in my family tree--but I didn't know that then and Mary was a popular choice.

I am grateful for the rain and that it is tapering off! Grateful that perhaps the drought will end and I can grow basil plants again. I will pick a project and go do it.