a gray saturday, and an exercise in gratitude.

Some days, we all need a little reminder that our cups runneth over…

wordless wednesday no. 31, because there really are no words to describe this.

did you know?

Are you getting your minimum daily requirement?

tea?

For about a week, I've been under the weather with a nasty little head cold accompanied by a nagging cough. My self-prescribed treatment plan has included plenty of rest, steaming my head, sleeping semi-upright  with a lavender heat pack on my chest, cough syrup, and gallons and gallons of hot liquids.

I've had hot and sour soup, miso soup, ramen, red zinger tea, lemon zinger tea, ginger tea with honey and lemon, black tea, green tea, red tea and chamomile tea. And you know what? 

The tea that really hits the spot is very traditional, a tea your grandmother probably drank: Earl Grey. It's basically a black tea infused with oil of bergamot, derived from a type of very aromatic citrus fruit something like a cross between an orange and a lemon. The flavor is very floral, almost like lavender, and very soothing with honey and a bit of milk.

It's also the tea of choice for the captain of the Starship Enterprise, Jean Luc Picard...and the Captain knows best.

I'm feeling better already.

deja vu all over again

The Daily Show
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So, I always wondered about that...I guess history does repeat itself!

how not to sell your stuff on craigslist

Let's say for instance, you have a treadmill in your bedroom that's turned into a very expensive thing on which to hang your clothes. You've  given up hope you or your significant other will ever use it again, because...let's face it: your home is not a 24 Hour Fitness, and the only place in the house it fits is in your bedroom, where you are forced to exercise facing a blank wall. So you haul it out to the garage, where it now sits, covered in camping gear and dust, preventing you from actually using your garage for a place to park your car.
Two or three years go by, and you attempt to argue with your wife in defense of your most sincere desire to start a new fitness routine (an argument you lose, because she'd rather have a place to park her car) and you decide to sell it on craigslist.
 So, you take a picture, put in the pertinent info, and post it on the website.

Hmmm. Perhaps you should try again. The first ad didn't seem to get any response at all...

Then your wife says, "Maybe a new exercise routine isn't such a bad idea after all, honey."

on 2012: notes from an eternal optimist

I've been giving a lot of thought to the various prophecies about the world ending in 2012. Some of my friends are deeply troubled by these predictions and are taking steps to prepare for dire circumstances they are sure are coming. They see the strife and hardship and natural disasters and anger that has been building in the recent past and believe these occurrences to be a fulfillment of ancient and not so ancient prophecies that foretell the world ending in a great cataclysm of fire and brimstone.

Anyone who reads a newspaper could tell you it doesn't take a scholar to figure out that we could very easily destroy the world many times over with weapons we already possess.

I believe that in these ancient prophecies told and retold for countless generations, there is a kernel of truth.

Sometime long ago, it's possible that a gifted and wise person foresaw an end to a way of life that would eventually become unsustainable, and, as in a child's game of "telephone", the prediction was embellished and misheard, and retold again and again and again, until the message became something vastly different and very much darker, than the original version.

{cartoon borrowed from this site}

Eternal optimist that I am, I believe we're on the cusp of something big. The world is experiencing huge growth and change. And as any parent of an adolescent will tell you, rapid growth and change is not always easy. In fact, it can be downright ugly.

As the parent of two former adolescents, (who have turned out quite well, I must say) I can assure you that--should we manage to live through mankind's adolescence--the best is yet to come.

Here's a video that sums it all up much better than I can:

Wishing you peace, prosperity, health, happiness and good will in the coming year,
your ridiculously optimistic pal,
Petunia  

a back to school tutorial: how not to do laundry

This post was originally published in 2008, and still gets the most number of reads per week of all my posts (followed closely by "Photo styling 101: How to roll towels like a pro"). The traffic around this post always increases exponentially in mid September (coincidentally, around the time newly-minted college students start running out of clean laundry and begin frantically searching the internet for instructions) so I'm rerunning it as a sort of public service message, or maybe a cautionary tale. So let this be a lesson to you!

How not to do laundry

   We have a system for doing laundry at Camp Cactus...the evolution of which seemed to happen rather organically, and naturally (meaning: nobody actually designed the system, it just sort of occurred; and said system's evolution has happened at an agonizingly slow pace, like the melting of the glaciers before global warming). Here's how it works:
Step 1: There are 3 baskets, beautifully handmade by child laborers highly skilled workers in China. One for WHITES, one for LIGHTS, and one for DARKS. Are you with me so far? Ok, so these three beautifully handmade baskets usually reside in our ridiculously huge bathroom, waiting patiently to be filled with the correct shade of dirty laundry. (This seems very simple and logical and easy to me...so why do so many people insist upon doing their laundry in one giant, washing machine- killing load? But, I digress...)

Alternate Step 1: See steps three and four for explanation.


Step 2: The now-full basket of dirty laundry is moved into the hallway outside the bathroom, waiting for someone (anyone?) to carry it down 2 flights of stairs, over 2 baby gates (a story for another time) to the basement laundry room/hovel to be washed until sparkling clean, or at least smelling like spring rain.


Step 3: The sparkling clean, smelling-like-spring-rain laundry is plopped warm and fresh out of the dryer into its beautiful and functional Chinese basket, carted back up two flights of now exceedingly steep stairs, over two baby gates (destined to someday cause one of us in our increasingly aged condition to break a hip), to the bedroom, where it is deposited in the middle of the floor. This location was chosen (again in some organic, evolutionary way) for its position relative to moving about the bedroom, meaning of course that anyone wishing to move about must step around it. Evolutionary timeline of this era: millions of years (okay...maybe a day or two or five) Which brings us back to Alternate Step 1: (see above) where dirty laundry waits not for an empty basket.

Step 4: After a few days sitting in the middle of the bedroom floor, the piles of dirty laundry have grown too big for the bathroom, and something must be done. So, the basket is emptied onto the largest flat surface available for folding.


At which time, it has started to resemble a giant sand castle molded in the shape of a hideous malformed lump, startling the lounging cat, and causing whoever faces the task of sorting (and sometimes even folding) this pile to sigh loudly and complain about the whole system.



There. All done. Now isn't that better? Stay tuned for my next tutorial: How not to fold sheets. Coming soon.

what are you waiting for?

word week, day seven

I've been thinking about the power of words all week.
Words can envelop us in feelings of joy, hope, understanding, excitement, love, sympathy, empathy and kindness. They can also anger, upset, hurt, challenge, denigrate, disrupt, confuse and defeat us.  Words can slap us in the face or surround us in warmth, kill our desire or inspire our creativity.
A simple word lying on the page or resting in our brain doesn't have this power all by itself. A word must be used with intent for it to have power.

We choose the way we string together those words.
We choose the direction.
How we say things does matter.
What direction will you choose?

word week, day 6

word week, day two

“Be Impeccable With Your Word.

 Speak with integrity. 

Say only what you mean. 

Avoid using the word to speak against yourself 

or to gossip about others. 

Use the power of your word 
in the direction of truth and love."

~ Don Miguel Ruiz

word week, day one

loneliness is a state of mind

A lovely little film and a novel perspective.

unsolicited advice, part three: are you happy now?

A few months ago, a concerned neighbor left a note on my car kvetching about the sorry state of our parking strip. Apparently, she/he was worried about our weeds spreading to surrounding gardens. This anonymous neighbor (and I'm pretty sure I know who you are now), who evidently has a bird's eye view of our property and all the time in the world to critique my gardening skills, somehow missed the countless hours we've spent trying to battle those very same weeds over the course of the almost 20 years we've lived here.

So to make a long story even longer because I know you're just dying to find out what happened, here's the progress that has been made since my last update:

I dug out the dreaded horseradish and Canada thistles once again

and cleared the patch for phase two of what I'm now calling Operation Victory Garden.

Here's the pile of cedar 2x6's we saved from our deck remodel a couple of years ago. I've been planning on building some new raised planters with them. After scaring away about a hundred spiders, I picked through the boards and hauled them out to the sidewalk.

I measured and cut all the boards and waited for Dave to get home,

because assembling those suckers turned out to be a two person job.

While taking a break from screwing assembling the boxes, Dave inspected my weeding job and pointed out I'd missed some horseradish that was growing in the street in a crack between the curb and the asphalt.

He determined it was time to try a new method of eradication.

And discovered it takes a lot of heat to burn horseradish leaves.

In a last-ditch effort to keep the horseradish from coming up again, I decided to line all the planters with 1/4" metal screening and covered that with a layer of weed-blocking fabric. That step took a ridiculously long time, because the screening doesn't come in sizes wide enough to cover the bottom of the bed in one piece, and I figured if I didn't sew all the seams together that horseradish would certainly find its way through any crack.

My friends Iris and Laurie stopped by and helped shovel dirt for awhile.

This entire project has turned into a communal garden of sorts. Dave and I built the beds and provided the land and water, and my friend Laurie bought the dirt and helped fill all the planters in return for the use of the one farthest from the camera. We finally got all the vegetables and seeds planted at the end of June.

Here's what the garden looked like last week:

The corn is well over my head.

Laurie went on vacation, and by the time she got back,

her radishes were the size of torpedoes.

And I thought I was being smart by planting only one zucchini, but I've harvested four in the past week. (Those giant leaves hide the squash until they're the size of baseball bats!)

Anyone got any good zucchini recipes?

unsolicited advice, part two

Last week, after an unidentified neighbor left an anonymous note on the windshield of my car, I wrote a blog post about it. (Click here to read part one of this little saga, and don't forget to read the comments) It seems that in their opinion I have been slacking in my gardening duties, and therefore, by my sloth, have raised the Noxious Weed Threat Level to ORANGE (see chart below)


I received many supportive comments from my friends in the blogging community (I'm truly touched that you're all so pissed off for me!) as well as from my lovely neighbors who assured me they wouldn't hesitate to come over and pull the damn weeds out themselves if they could only identify them.

What the passive aggressive note-writer didn't seem to know is that I have been battling this particular patch of weeds for years. In fact, along with the dreaded Canadian thistles (Cirsium arvense) the parking strip is also overrun with horseradish, for which there seems to be no known enemy. In fact, I'm now convinced that in the event of a nuclear bomb blast, it would just spread bits of roots everywhere and the radioactive horseradish would happily repopulate the earth.

In September of 2008, I finally gave the go ahead to use Roundup to clear the patch, after 17 years of attempting to eradicate the stuff organically. We sprayed it, and left it to die for several weeks, after which we covered it with thick black plastic and let it sit over the entire winter and well into the spring of 2009.

We finally pulled up the plastic in June, only to discover snow white shoots of horseradish growing everywhere, followed several weeks later by sprouts of Canadian thistle. I set to work once again, digging deep craters in an attempt to get out all the roots, then bored holes in the roots that remained and poured undiluted Roundup into them.

This was nearly a year ago, and with the arrival of warm spring weather in 2010, the buggers are back with a vengeance. And now some busybody is giving me crap about slacking.

I have been considering my options for the past few years and have come up with another strategy to thwart the weeds' plans for world domination, but I just haven't had time to implement it yet, as I've been too busy working hard trying to keep the mortgage paid and food on the table. So in the meantime, this will have to do: I posted a discreet sign in the parking strip to ward off any more well-intentioned public diatribes.

unsolicited advice...

To the thoughtful neighbor(s) who left me this note on the windshield of my car today in the pouring rain:

Thank you SO MUCH for your helpful suggestion. I will attend to it IMMEDIATELY.

Anything else you'd like me to attend to while I'm at it? Perhaps the color of my house is not to your liking?

And I really do appreciate you leaving the note on my car instead of knocking on my door and telling me in person. My psychiatrist says I need to avoid confrontation because I have serious anger management issues, even though I hardly ever act on my violent impulses.

Now, if you could excuse me, I must go fertilize my dandelions.

Your slightly disgruntled neighbor,

Petunia