Thankfulness five

I am thankful for people who are also half a bubble off plumb. Watch these little movies - especially "Modern Daydreams - Unleashed" You will laugh.

http://mitchellrose.com/

thankfulness four

I am thankful for my mechanical servants. They wash my dishes and my clothes, dry the clothes, entertain me and keep me informed. I don't need to send a footman with a note to all my knitting buddies to plan a party. I just e-mail. I don't need a washerwoman, and thanks to my penchant for poly-cotton knits, I don't need a maid to weild the flatirons.

We have so much food half-prepared these days. I don't need to hire a cook to spend entire days making chicken stock for the soup, or mixing up baking powder and fiddling with the wood and the dampers to bake a cake. Noodles are ready-made. Chickens arrive ready plucked and pulled, often cut and sorted into parts, sometimes even skinned and boned. I don't even know how to pluck a bird. Imagine plucking that whole doggone turkey!

I am thankful for sliced bread, and packaged butter. I am grateful that I don't have to spend my life in the kitchen just to put food on the table. I am grateful I never had to learn how to can beans or salt pork.

I am oh, so thankful for my refrigerator and freezer! Living on dried, pickled and home-canned all winter long would be SO grim!

I have so much leisure and luxury. No problems with the coachman and the ostler getting into fights. No wondering what to do when it turns out the kitchen maid was no better than she should be and is now in an interesting condition, but she's the only one who gets along with the cook, and the cook is conservative with a budget and liberal with a meal, so she must be catered to.

On the days when I get home from work just bone tired, I want to go down on my knees and thank all the powers that be that I do not have to wash sheets, towels, levis, and dresses with seven yard hemlines by hand on a washboard.

And I am thankful that I have so much food available to me that I can be fourty pounds overweight. (Sarah Bernhardt was the most beautiful woman of her day. She was five feet tall and weighed 150 pounds. She was cinched so tightly into her corsets that her hips stuck out vertically from her waist. This was beautiful. Her forearms were so plump that the bone on her wrist did not show. Plump round women were a sign of wealth and luxury. I'm thankful I can drop a few pounds without losing my charms.)

I am thankful DH and I don't have to go to the Thanksgiving dinners we grew up with - complete with hurt feelings, angry people, drunken parents and spiritual battering. We usually avoid the "Family" holidays. I am so thankful that we don't have to travel cross-country to be with people we might love, but don't really get along with. We are going out for dinner tonight at a nice restaurant. I am thankful for the people who will be cooking and serving our meal and cleaning up after us.

And I am thankful, with every breath I take, for my dear husband, who takes care of me and provides me with every possible opportunity to be happy.

thankfulness three

I am thankful for the childhood I had. Running wild in the woods with no electricity all summer taught me how to amuse myself. My parents didn't meet my intellectual or emotional needs, and I wasted far too much time being resentful, but darn-it, I learned early how to meet my own needs, and that's a terrific survival trait. I am thankful for the parents I had, who did the best they could with what they had, and who never knew quite what to make of me.

I am thankful for the brothers who taught me that I am not the epicenter of the universe.

I am thankful, oh so thankful, that I was able to escape small-town life and get away to boarding school in the city. It was like getting out of prison. It was like being a plant that had sprouted in a dim, dry basement, and been transplanted into a well-fertilized garden.

I am thankful that I learned to read early. Books have always been my friends, and knowledge has been my favorite toy.

And oh boy am I thankful for modern medicine! Kids used to die all the time from "a putrid sore throat." I had my tonsils out at age five. Lots of people were partially deaf by adulthood because of ear infections. I got antibiotics. Modern dentistry is a wonder! During the civil war, MANY men were disqualified from service because they did not have two teeth that met closely enough for them to bite the powder cartridges and tear them open. For centuries, ladies used fans to conceal the gaps in their smiles, and to re-direct the stench of rotting teeth. I still have all my own teeth except three wisdom teeth. I am VERY thankful for my teeth!! I had a c-section. Women used to die all the time from breech births. I got hepatitis from a dirty salad. If it's weren't for IV fluids, I would have died. Could not hold down water, let alone food. I was so dehydrated that I had no blood pressure. Thank GOD for modern medicine! And earlier this year, when I had blood poisoning, modern medicine allowed me to keep my arm AND my life. If I had lived a century earlier, my number would surely have been up before I hit fourty, and here I am looking at sixty in a few months.

Am I getting too preachy here? It's just that there is such a lot to be thankful for.

thankfulness two

I am thankful that I can sleep through the night without gunfights breaking out in the neighborhood or bombs going off. We don't even have children to tend. We can go to bed with every expectation of 8 hours of peace. The river will not rise so high that it floods us out. Hurricanes and tornadoes do not visit here. Nature and mankind will not disturb our sleep. I am so profoundly thankful! I LOVE to sleep! Napping, dozing and snoozing are also high on my rave faves list. There's so much to be said for a good brisk nap. Power lounging is quite enjoyable, too. I am ever so thankful that I frequently get to be lazy!!

When I have a bad day I comfort myself with the thoughts that at least no one is shooting at me, and I'm not pregnant. The thought of being pregnant at age 59 is so appalling that everything else in life looks rosy by comparison.

I am thankful for knitting and for other knitters. Knitters are fabulous people! How would I have gotten to know all of you if I didn't know how to knit?

I didn't get organized enough to take my knitting to work yesterday. Over the course of the day I nervously tore two fingernails down to the quick and picked at a cuticle till it bled. I MUST have something to do with my hands! I am SO thankful for knitting. It soothes me, gives me a sense of identity (I knit; therefore I am a knitter.)and at the end of a fidgety day, I have created several inches of useful, beautiful fabric.

Surely there are cranky, unpleasant, selfish, uptight knitters. I'm thankful that I don't know them.

I am thankful that I have a life where, if you welcome people with cheer and respect, many of them respond accordingly. I'm not a street person with every man's hand against me. I am not a criminal, mistrusting everyone I know because I know that I can not be trusted. There, but for the grace of God, go I. I am thankful to be who I am, where I am, when I am.

Thankfulness one

Things for which I am thankful:

My dear husband who believes that it is his job to keep me happy. And he's very good at his job!

Our warm, dry, house with the soft warm bed and the INDOOR PLUMBING!

Have you ever spent time in a home without a flush toilet? The privy is Never in the right place. It's about fifty yards away from the house, which in summer is fifty yards too close, and in winter is fifty yards too far. Imagine a bout of dysentery during a sub-zero cold snap. Your cheeks could get frostbite from the seat. People take indoor plumbing much too much for granted. Be thankful for your toilet!

I am thankful to have all my body parts still working. They may not be in factory fresh condition, but they still function adequately.

I am thankful to have warm clothes and shoes.

I am thankful to have a job that I enjoy and co-workers that are a delight.

I am thankful that I work because I want to, not because I have to.

We live in the richest country, in the richest epoch in the history of the world. I am profoundly thankful for all the luxuries that even kings could not have enjoyed in the past. Entertainment at the touch of a button. Instant communication with any part of the world. Antibiotics!! Modern dentistry.

I am thankful for the opportunity to study history and learn how people used to live, so I won't take my bounty for granted. At the beginning of the 20th century, the average life expectancy for an American male was 47 years. How's that for a reality check?

More meditations on things to be thankful for tomorrow.

A touch of gold

It's half past November. The maples, aspen and sumac are bare. The oak trees cling stubbornly to their dead brown leaves like mothers refusing to let go of their grown sons. The wind and rain have scoured the city. But I can not remember another year when the cottonwoods were so beautiful. They are banks of stored sunshine, clustering along the rivers and creeksides. You could trace the water from a plane, by following the trails of gold.
And then, when the sun breaks through the one thin spot in the clouds and illuminates the world, the cottonwoods glow! Happy, happy, happy!



LG, the wonderful woman that she is, organized a night at the ballet for us. There is a dance troupe in town, Body Vox, who are so creative, so witty,so deep,so exquisitely skillful, playful and talented that I'm perpetually astonished to find them here, and not in some "Big" artistic center. Thank you, thank you, LG!

We saw a retrospective of their work from the last twelve years, to celebrate their new performance space. While the space was underconstruction, they began choreographing dances with the boards and dollies they found in the work space. Another dance is three nearly naked men suspended in a welded silver cage which they climb in and out of, over and through, defying gravity and expectations and evoking powerful emotions of constraint and release with no mugging, miming or sign language. My favorite piece was called "Urban Meadow" with most of the troupe wearing overcoats, wooly hats, socks with pompoms around the cuffs. They are sheep. There is also a sheepdog who keeps them together, sees to their well-being, and defends them from the wolf (wearing tight pants, no shirt, a furry vest, a chuppa ski hat with the earflaps pulled down, and a dangerous expression.) He succeeds in snatching one lamb who strays from the flock. He tries to take a ram but the ram bleats loudly and the dog rescues him (literally pulling him out of the arms of the wolf.) Then the dog and the wolf fight, pawing and slapping at one another till the dog hoists the wolf over his shoulder and slaps his butt several times quite loudly. The wolf falls still. The dog re-gathers the frightened flock and settles them down for the night. It was funny, tender, gentle. It was choreographed by someone who understands sheep. And it amazed me how an overcoat and a fuzzy hat can create a surprisingly believable sheep costume for a gifted dancer. It was worth braving the rainy dark night for an evening with LG and the stunning performances of Body Vox!

Two things I noticed: 1. These dancers are NOT in the first flush of youth, but they still move like music. 2.These people are STRONG but also limber and lean. The guys in the cage hung dead still from the bottom from curled arms for about a full minute while moving their legs in slow motion running in mid-air. Then they flexed a bit more, and (apparently)effortlessly pulled themselves up to the top of the cage. AND these lads are NOT bulked up! Trim, well-defined biceps and shoulders, yes - flat, lightly ridged bellies, yes, but no unnaturally swollen shoulders or abnormally deliniated six-packs. Body builders impress me less than gymnasts. Dancers impress me most of all.


On the blog comments, I have been getting spam lately, so I had to turn on comment moderation. Sorry 'bout that, but someone wants us all to meet hot singles and watch their explicit videos. Hopefully, they'll get bored if we just ignore them for a while.

My alarm clock

It's been quite a while since I've slept past five am. My alarm clock, chirps, squeeks, does the whiskers in the ear bit, and will, if she can find an opeining or create one, run under the covers and play pokey pincushion with her claws and my quivering flesh.



She also wakes DH. Adorably.

Lo these many . . .

A while ago, Lyssa took a couple sections of her lusty Christmas cacti, wrapped them in tissue, and stuck them in an envelope to send to me. "Just stick the round end in the dirt." She said.

Look, they thrive! They bloom! It's Christmas!!!



Over the suummer I have been working at minimizing the stash, and sent some weaving yarns to Dave Daniels, the master fiber artist. He dyed some white yarn gorgeous colors, and did some color play. Didn't care for the purple on the outside of the warp, so cut it off. I spoke up and begged for the cast-off bits. (I have a fun scarf pattern knit lengthwise that uses short bits of yarn.)

So he wove a charming pink and tealish wool scarf and sent it to me! This is me all over. Oooo, ooo!





And when Abundant Yarn and Dyeworks went out of business, I picked up some alpaca and silk roving in a sophisticated gray that cried out for Dave's skillful spinning. It was an early Christmas gift.
He spun it up and sent it back. How - I do NOT know how he could have let that sensual elegance out of his hands. Heaven knows I won't. This may lead me into the viral pit of lace knitting. What a stunning scharf this would make with some steel beads in it. Definitely cruise wear worthy.
!!