95.7° F at 7 p.m.

Anniversary quilt

Ever since I made my first quilt right before Audrey was born, I've been wanting to do a bigger one for our bed. Making a quilt to commemorate our wedding anniversary seemed appropriate, and the sixteenth anniversary was a logical choice, since a square quilt will nicely cover our king-size bed, and a completion goal of May 2011 would give me plenty of time for the ambitious tasks of piecing a large quilt by machine and then quilting it by hand.

Back at the end of December, I started sketching. My color palettes (warm tones of orange and yellow, and cool tones of blue and purple) were inspired by some of my favorite flowers: lilacs, hyacinths, hydrangeas, irises, poppies and marigolds. After repeated rearranging and several designs I scrapped completely, I came up with the sketch above.

It's the same arrangement of pieces as the squares in Audrey's quilt, but the colors are grouped to create a completely different design, and the sashing and borders are also different.

The middle sixteen squares are surrounded by a modified "piano key" border, which will be made from 1" x 4" strips of fabric from the same palette sewn together but in random order.

Outside of that is an 8" border I had originally intended to be contrast fabric (a fabric that picked up all the colors from both my palettes), but after some browsing online, I realized it was going to be virtually impossible to find a fabric with all those colors (or even most of them) together. So I looked in some art books and online at Aztec and Mayan textiles and stonework, and came up with a sort of "Aztec key" design that I could plot out in 1" squares of fabric for a mosaic effect that would accomplish the same purpose as the contrast fabric.

On the very outside, I added another 4" piano key border to bring the quilt's dimensions to 96 square inches, which should cover my bed nicely.

For the past six months I've been collecting fabrics here and there, and just this week I got my final piece. Now the fun starts!

Cheap cherries, part 2

I've mentioned before what an Alton Brown fanboy Jim is. A couple years ago he saw the "Whithering Bites" episode of Good Eats and ever since, he's been dying to try out Alton's improvised dehydrator made from a box fan, bungee cords, and furnace filters. I know—furnace filters?

Our recent windfall of cherries provided the perfect opportunity for Jim to finally make the dehydrator. Right before lunch we created a little assembly line with Jimmy pitting, me slicing, and Jim arranging the cherries in the filters. We prepped a batch of about three or four pounds of cherries, two 20" x 20" filters full. It takes around 48 hours for the fruit to dry out, which means it'll be a warm night in our bedroom without the box fan... but it should be worth it!

Tightwad tuesday: cheap cherries

This post doesn't exactly fall under the category of tightwad tips, but I suppose I could sum it up by saying, Always be prepared to jump on a good deal when you see it.

A couple weeks ago my mother-in-law called and asked if we were interested in ordering some cherries; she had a source in Wenatchee where she could get Bings for $1 a pound. That was a definite no-brainer. We ordered twenty pounds, so we'd have enough to eat some fresh, dehydrate some for later, and still have plenty for Jim's latest pet project: making cherry jam.

We picked up the cherries at her house yesterday afternoon and on the way home, we stopped at Bimart to buy a cherry pitter. They were fresh out of the cheapo plastic two buck hand pitters, so we sprang for the extra thirteen dollars to get a fancy-shmancy cherry stoner. Jim claims it paid for itself in the first ten minutes, since he and Jimmy had to pit nine cups of cherries to make ten pints of jam.

Jim's Spiced Cherry Jam

4½ cups pitted and chopped cherries
7 cups sugar
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon red food coloring
¼ teaspoon ground allspice
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
6 oz. pectin

Measure the prepared cherries into a large, heavy kettle. Add the sugar and stir well. Place over high heat and, stirring constantly, bring quickly to a full boil, with bubbles over the entire surface. Add the remaining ingredients, except the pectin. Boil hard for one minute, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and add the pectin. Skim off any foam. Ladle into eight hot half-pint jars. Seal, then process for four minutes in a hot water bath, counting the time from when the water comes again to a rolling boil after immersing jars.

Pigtails

Audrey's teachers in the nursery class at church took these snapshots, for her to choose one to put on the front of a Father's Day card for her dad. She picked the third one down, and also made an outline of her hand and some crayon scribbles on the inside to finish it off.

Tightwad tuesday: turn and return

I have to admit, wrapping up the home-school year really cut into my blogging, and it's taken me a couple weeks to set my house in order now that we're finally done. But I'm hoping to get back into blogging more regularly now that it's summer vacation. So, in the spirit of getting back into it...

A while back Jim sent me a link to a great article on MSN that gave seven painless ways to save $1000. Here's my favorite:

Return unopened, unused items. Many times, extra money may be even closer at hand than you might think... Nearly everyone has a recently purchased product they will never use: the too-large blouse that still has the tag on it or an unopened set of salt-and-pepper shakers that didn't fit the kitchen decor... Even if you can't find your receipt, the retailer may accept the return for a store credit.

(Oh, and if you click on the link to read the entire article, be sure to check out the sidebars, which offer some great links to reader tips for frugal living.)

Revise, revise, revise

As I mentioned before, one of the best things I took away from the poetry workshop I went to last month was an appreciation for the importance of revision, something I've always struggled to do with my poetry. Along with the guidance on rewriting I got some good tips for reference materials. One of them I immediately went out and purchased from Half.com: The Poetry Home Repair Manual, by Ted Kooser. And I must say, like his poetry, this slim volume of advice for beginning poets is full of easily accessible, pithy insights that sing in their simplicity. But I'll stop gushing before I start to sound too much the fangirl (which I admittedly am).

I wanted, really wanted, to like the advice from Sam Green (and Kooser as well) to keep a notebook for working on drafts and gathering ideas, because those black and white notebooks poking out of Mr. Green's satchel just seemed so... writerly. I have to confess, though, that one of the things I've really hated about revisions in the past is the unruly sheaf of papers it seems to create: stray yellow sheets ripped from legal pads, pieces of odd-shaped scratch paper and even the occasional scrap torn from the side of a brown paper bag, trapped unreliably between the pages of a notebook swollen to twice its former size.

Barring that, bound notebooks make it difficult for me to keep drafts of the same poem in the same place (unless I leave a lot of empty pages after each poem), and ring binders are just too clunky. So after some tweaking, I think I've found a system for organizing my poems and tracking revisions that embraces the idea of a notebook, but eliminates the clutter and potential for losing that stray sheet with the perfect poem I will never, ever be able to recreate.

Originally I had one Word document where I kept all my poetry, with the most recent poems added on at the beginning as I wrote them. If I did any revisions, I'd usually make changes to the poem in the document without any way to keep track of what I altered. Unfortunately, that system didn't allow me to go back later and see what I had originally written. Word has a feature that tracks changes, but I found all the red tags indicating edits to be extremely distracting as I tried to concentrate on reading and re-crafting my words. I finally hit on the idea of keeping all my poetry in a single folder, continuing to use my Word document for any new writing, but then cutting and pasting any poem I was actively revising into its own Word document. Now, each time I want to revise, I copy and paste the most recent version of the poem at the top of the document and make a note of the date, then rework the copy, leaving the older versions intact below.

So far this new system has been working well; for the last month I've buckled down to rework three or four poems I've written over the last year, and in some instances have gone back to earlier drafts to recapture details or imagery. One of the poems I wrote last July and it's been through several incarnations since then, but I think I'm getting close to being satisfied with it.


Ovenjoy

She baked bread in old blue and white yeast cans
she set the loaves to cool on racks
in a row of lofty gold butter-brushed domes
mushrooming to spill over tin rims
they were best within five minutes from the oven
the knife freeing each yielding round slice
in a rush of sweet yeasty steam
gently spread with butter
and eaten hot enough to barely scald my palms
but not blister the roof of my mouth
as my teeth tore the glorious wheat tissue

within a few years she would send me
all gangling reticence behind bleach streaked bangs
shuffling my scuffed white hole-in-the-toe sneakers
the entire two long blocks to Safeway
chipped fuchsia fingernails shoved deep in the front pockets
of my pegged and faded 501’s
back pockets stuffed with change:
handfuls of tarnished pennies
gleaned from the yawning broken zipper mouth
of her frayed tan purse
a couple of dimes
that had nestled between her hairbrush's teeth
a few nickels
retrieved from the folds of old grocery receipts
maybe even one or two quarters
from the side coin purse on her wallet

always just enough for four cheap loaves of
Ovenjoy
foamy white
perfectly square
uniformly sliced
preservative laden
negligibly nutritious
Ovenjoy
every loaf enshrined
in its own shiny bag
blue and yellow letters
cheerfully emblazoned
on all five sides
Ovenjoy
Ovenjoy Ovenjoy Ovenjoy
Ovenjoy

I slid first one slice, then another
in and out of the toaster
slathered them in margarine
sprinkled them with sugar cinnamon
then retreated to my room
closed my door behind me
balancing a stack of cinnamon toast
in a pile on a plastic plate decorated
with a faded spray of brown and pink roses
surprised I couldn’t taste a single slice
no matter how many I ate
could only feel the viscous grit
of margarine mixed with sugar
and all the thousand sharp edges on each piece of toast
tearing into the roof of my mouth
and the insides of my cheeks

I’d always try another slice just to see if it
would taste the same
would finally feed me
the way her bread used to do
but it never did.

Memorial day

Memorial Day was a big deal at our house because Jimmy rode his bike without training wheels for the first time. In the morning, Jim took him out back and had him help take the training wheels off the bike, then they walked a couple blocks to practice on the quarter-mile track behind the local middle school.

About ten minutes later Jim called me on his cell phone, ecstatic that Jimmy had already gotten his balance after a little shove off from his dad, and now they were working on stopping and starting. I didn't really need to ask, but I did anyway: "Should I come down there with the camera and camcorder?"

So I strapped Audrey into the stroller, grabbed the camera bag, and we headed to the track.

Starting up is still a bit tricky.

Look at him go!

That's another lap around the track!

The smile says it all.

Audrey was very intent on watching Jimmy ride.

Go, Jimmy, go!

There's little bits of me in there, but this girl sure looks like her father.

Gimme some sugar, Daddy!

Dream big

Last week I got a new calling at church: teaching the Valiant 9-10 class. For my non-Mormon readers, that means I'm teaching a Sunday School class of nine and ten year-old boys and girls. Sunday was my first day on the new gig, and I must say, it was fun to be back in Primary after five years away.

So, I'm sitting with my class on a row of plastic chairs in the cultural hall (read: gymnasium with carpet) and Jimmy is sitting with his teacher on the row directly across the aisle, not so subtly waving at me. My friend Debbie is leading the music, teaching all the kids a song about Jesus getting baptized. She says, "When Jesus came to John the Baptist and asked to be baptized, he said, 'But you don't need to be baptized Jesus, because you're already perfect.'"

From the third row, my son pipes up, "I'm perfect, too!"

My need to maintain some semblance of dignity as the new teacher is the only way I manage to keep from rolling on the floor. Barely.

NaPoWriMo #30: re-write

This is the super-duper chock-full-o-poetry final installment of NaPoWriMo. What a blessed relief! It's been an amazing day for poetry; I spent all day at a poetry workshop with Sam Green, the Washington State poet laureate. Wow.

Not just the wow of having an entire day to myself (sans children) to focus on art and creativity and the stimulating conversation of other poets. But wow of wisdom shared. Wow of being able, for once, to go to the table teachable and be schooled in where I could do better. Wow of embracing criticism and the excitement that comes from growth after. Wow of driving home completely drained from the mental exertion of being engaged and present in my art, and not having to cook dinner after. (Thank you, thank you, to my dear husband who wrangled the kids all day and didn't complain, then suggested we hit our favorite Chinese buffet for supper.)

I came away from the workshop with more interest in revising my work and more confidence in how to do it. I feel like I came away with my toolbox filled with functional implements for working my craft, for which I'm so grateful, as well as a shift in attitude about embracing failure and imperfection as a means to better understanding. And since the most recent prompt at Read Write Poem was to revise an existing poem, that's exactly what I'm doing, with the understanding that this is only the first of what will most likely be many revisions. Go here to see the original (which is very recent); the revision—mostly minor tweaks, with a few cuts and a few additions—is below.


Going to Grayland

I’ve got two little ones
strapped in the back seat
and it’s me alone up front
on a day trip to my roots
with an option to stay awhile
each town a bright bead
on this gray silk string
Ellensburg on one end
Seattle somewhere in the middle
Tukwila, Tacoma, Dupont
Olympia, Tumwater, Elma
Satsop, Aberdeen, Westport,
Grayland tying off the strand

hands relaxed on the wheel
my eye catches the glitter of sun
playing off two diamonds
two wedding rings nestled
next to each other on my ring finger
two Christmases ago my mother
gave me nana’s ring, said
keep it three years then pass it on
to one of your sisters
purposefully I brought it with me
on this trip to the home
where my nana came as a new bride

she was a Boston girl, a lady
with wit, sense and style
a trim Navy nurse with soft brown curls
blue eyes that laughed, cried and
smiled all at the same time
she told stories about the war
she and the other nurses living in Quonset huts
near the base hospital on Oahu
and lowering her voice
as if someone might overhear about
another nurse getting discharged
for fraternizing with a married officer
which is why when one of her patients
a young officer
asked her to dinner
she looked up his next of kin first
then graciously accepted
the invitation of the son
of the Reverend Clark Cottrell
from Grayland, Washington

could she have known then
what it would mean
that he would bring her home
down miles of narrow roads winding
through interminable shades of silver, slate and jade
crisp salty stiffness of a breeze blowing
from the ocean to mix with pungent
moss-grown spruce, fir and pine
across one-lane bridges
arching over tidal flats
then down Highway 105
through shorter coastal forest
dotted on each side with small, scattered houses
turning onto the final stretch of Gould Road
that he would bring her home
to Reverend and Mrs. Cottrell
to a younger sister and three brothers but one
to cranberry bogs, skunk cabbage, weather-beaten dunes
to no running water and
all her favorite shoes spoiled with mold?

I look at her ring, then at mine
thinking of my own husband
bringing me home to his parents
to windswept Kittitas Valley
rolling out from the sinuous backbone
of Manastash Ridge and laced
with Yakima River's meandering tree-lined ribbon
fertile but still browner and drier
than the lush emerald bordered sound
and shimmering drizzled swath of my hometown
bringing me to live
in a single-wide trailer
with running water and a toilet
but no shower

and now returning through the familiar green
that became her home
and once was mine I realize
like her, I didn’t choose the landscape of my love
but only who took me there.