Bloggin' the midnight oil

a favorite single-pane comic by Mutts author, Patrick McDonnell

Buster and Lucy on the Cape Cod National Seashore

For the fourth year, I took the furmaly to Cape Cod for Christmas weekend and the dogs couldn't have been happier. Buster is more of a woodsy dog, and loved to stare out the window at a little patch of woods between the house we rented in Yarmouth and a neighboring golf course. Lucy was antsy most of the trip, but after a couple hours of running on the beach, today she seems to be wiped out. We pack the car with groceries for cooking small feasts and cheersing with seasonal beers. This year's unique treat we packed was Jeni's Xocorosa ice cream and after almost forgetting it in the freezer, this morning we shared it on the car ride driving back to Boston. We used the house's fireplace and rented Pixar movies on iTunes like Ratatouille for an added small dose of joy.

I tried to take my own advice and be here now rather than constantly instagram and facebook, but I couldn't resist at least once a day uploading a few pictures like a selfie of me and a R2-D2 lawn ornament found in Brewster near the Snowy Owl coffee shop!

This coming week off of work, I had vowed to paint a couple rooms in Waterbell, but I'm not sure I can follow through on it. Ever since Thanksgiving, I have had a hard time sleeping and wake up around 4 in the morning with a busy, rushing mind. Winter break is probably a good time to try and reset my internal clock and painting rooms is always one of those activities that you start later than you intended to, and finish a few hours longer than you thought you would so maybe I should put it off to another long weekend.

My wide-awakeness seems to be related to anticipation for my job change coming up. Since February of 2016, I had been feeling ready to move on from Facing History. The organization and my colleagues have my heart more than anyplace I've ever worked before, but they are in the midst of some drastic changes that were long overdue. On June 1st, they had to cut a few full-time staff in Brookline, and since I had been through lay-offs several times before, I saw all the signs it was coming, and the month of May was intensely gloomy. Each day that passed felt like a week in the final few days. Several times I was walking around Brookline Village thinking to myself "I wonder if this is the last time I'll enjoy this street, or this shop." When the names were announced, instead of relief, everyone who was "safe" actually just felt worse, and confused, because after letting go of four staff due to financial strains, FH also posted and hired four new positions by the Fall.

I knew I didn't want to change jobs unless it meant a shorter commute where I could bike to work at least a couple times a week, since the past few years, I've been gaining weight and developing ongoing health problems which my doctors and physical therapists credit to the amount of hours I sit at a computer five or six days a week and never go to the gym. Since that's not going to change, realistically, I might as well bike to work for some fitness as a compromise. At Thanksgiving, my latest health issue was an excruciating Morton's Neuroma in my right foot which is so far not responding to cortisone injections but acupuncture seems to be helping some. The only relief has been to wear Birkenstocks daily, so I found myself requesting creative warm socks for Christmas (which Jose took me up on!)

Thankfully this Fall, I came across a seemingly perfect transition to a job at Harvard Kennedy School in an area called Evidence for Policy Design, where they needed a grant manager to work with program staff on translating complex financials into activities and decisions for their program work. It sounded very familiar, but this work will be on only international grants and with a team of public policy and economics faculty, instead of program associates. I'm very excited about starting in January. As I told my FH colleagues in a farewell note, although lots of famous people show up at HKS, my highest hope is to run into the ghost of Howard Zinn while burning the midnight oil during the annual budget season!

I'm elated that instead of having to hire to replace my position at Facing History, my boss and I have collaborated to promote one of my colleagues, Jackie, and I'll have a chance to show her the ropes after the holiday break. Now if I could just kick this anticipation that keeps waking me up at 3 or 4 in the morning. Back to Zzzzzz.

Diggin' It

We have been spoiled by the most gorgeous Autumn in Boston and I'm so grateful that my weekends have allowed me to get to a ton of favorite leaf-peeping spots like World's End, the bike path of the Charles River, Fresh Pond and Cape Cod.  Having to walk the dogs twice a day sure is a way to appreciate the outdoors a little more (except when it's raining or the sun goes down at 4 pm!).

Our back yard hasn't quite shed its leaves yet so we'll have another two or three weeks before it looks like this and the dogs will be in heaven (it's like a Chuck E. Cheese ball pit to a child).

Growth (this is hard)

After writing down my life story in memoir class last year, I really wanted to take a break from writing it this year and spend free time reading more memoirs (studying them for craft and style), and a bit more navel-gazing, for lack of a better term.

When I had spent time writing about events of the past few years, it became clear to me that when I moved from Colorado to Boston in 2010, then moved into my first house in 2012,  got married to Jose in 2014... although I was riding a powerful wave of joy and fun and turning over new leaves and spent tons of quality time with friends, I was also happily distracted from the near past, and did not recognize and reflect enough on the loss that was my last relationship, my years of life in Denver and my dog Derby.

I had briefly seen a therapist in early 2012 right after the move, but I felt like I couldn't even access the emotions yet. I certainly couldn't articulate what I was there to process.

While it was good for me to dive right into the positive changes that came with moving to Boston, I know I am still letting go of that first decade of the 2000's and recognizing what went wrong.  Although it wasn't designed as therapy, my memoir class at Grub was able to help me access this.

Sometimes the only way to find these thoughts and feelings is to sit in quiet alone, and since I'm really BAD at that, and my weekends don't always permit quiet time alone, I at least can find the space while walking the dogs for an hour (like today)!

The first part of 2016, I dedicated a lot of my weekend time to figuring out how to save money better and get us out of a surprising financial funk, which I have to admit was terribly embarrassing for me, since budgeting and finances are what I do so well at work. But it's going a lot better now, and it's been a pivotal reality check of just how undisciplined and seat of the pants I had been with spending for many years, but had never faced consequences before. I had always bailed myself out if I overspent in years prior, but after our wedding, the savings had dwindled.  It's coming back now and I feel so much better after facing it.

Recently, this summer, I have found myself reflecting on probably the worst bad habit in my life which is underlying criticism. Most women have this habit to some degree: some people are inwardly critical and some people are outwardly critical. My grandmothers were both famously outwardly critical. It can be a lifelong pain to carry when your parents are critical, which is something my mom suffered from (suffered her own mom's external criticism). Thank goodness, my parents weren't critical of me at all. So, why am I critical of others?  I wonder sometimes if it's biological, but whatever it is, I need to own it and change the tide.

You might argue that I'm pretty positive. It's true, I have been mentally a fan of Complaint Free Life since I discovered it in 2005, and I try to exude positivity in things like social media and interactions and gestures. In spite of this, I am passive-aggressively critical. I don't criticize deliberately or directly, but I tend to give people advice or suggestions or things to "consider". I justify this as thinking of myself as a role model, good friend or mentor, with the in between the lines message being You should this or that which is essentially my judgment of you. I have noticed that I say "you should" something close to forty times a day between my husband, my colleagues and my friends, which is too much. And I think the point is, if you're being externally critical, you're probably in denial of your self criticism.  Passive-aggressive is a typical form of denial, and denial is another word for dishonesty.

So, why am I bearing my soul about this right now?

It seemed like the opposite of denial to publicly admit that I know I need to work on this. And to request your forgiveness if I have "you shoulded" you too much.  To give a little discipline to the plan, I am attaching a jelly bracelet in the Complaint Free Life way. Any time I am critical or judge, I have to move the bracelet to the other hand as a start-over. The aim will be to get to 21 consecutive days without moving the bracelet, and ultimately, maybe longer.

p.s. I redesigned the blog layout with a new blue border. Hope it fits.

Paper Epiphanies

This past weekend, I had an opportunity to attend the annual National Stationery Show to help photograph the myriad booths for a blog called Oh So Beautiful Paper which is well known in the stationery industry.  I was unabashedly honest with Nole, the blog owner, as well as the exhibitors I met that it's an honor and a gift to be permitted to geek out openly about the notecards, wrapping paper, pens and other stationery items while walking the show floor!  

Thankfully, since having restraint in paper stores has never been my strength, these exhibitors were not selling individual items, but rather demonstrating their collection for wholesale buyers to pick their selection for 2017.  I was in sheer awe at the array of talent and humor in each of these booths.  It was refreshing and inspiring to encounter such a diverse pool of geographic locations in North America.  For some of the well-established card companies like egg press from Portland, OR, and Hello!Lucky from the Bay Area, I recognized many of their cards that I've purchased and mailed over the years.  For others, like Violet Press from Longmont, CO (near Boulder), Inclosed Letterpress from Omaha, and I Loot Paperie from Southern CA, they were newcomers who were incredibly humble to participate in the show and have their work photographed by Nole and me.  Generally, the exhibitors were overflowing with kindness and I just left beaming from the thrill of it.

I texted José at one point to say "Thanks for babysitting our unruly hounds and letting me come to this under short notice" and he wrote back, "I wouldn't have let you miss it for the world!"  What a husband.  One of my favorite surprise booths to bump into was Canadian, from of course, Vancouver, a city that I continue to daydream about living there... their art was all west coast surfing-inspired.  If anyone can think of a way we could convert citizenship easily this coming few years, seriously, let me know.  The idea keeps bumping around in my head like a pin ball ever since we spent our honeymoon on Vancouver Island.

While leaving the show Monday evening, I kept thinking about how I almost didn't write in when Beautiful Paper put out a call for a photography assistant.  The useless doubts that start with "never" were shooting it down in my head.  But I couldn't quiet my wonder about it, so after thinking on it for a few hours or so, I submitted an inquiry, and look at how happy it worked out.

Lagniappe

I really appreciate that unlike Microsoft Word or Google Docs, if you open a brand new "compose" window on Blogger and then abandon the browser without writing a word, it never saves it automatically as a blank post. In other words, it doesn't make me feel guilty about being unmotivated to complete a thought when I had a false start, or two, or three.  As a writer, I hate it when Microsoft freezes the screen, just to say, "Do you want to save changes to Document1?" and there's nothing in the doc at all.

Last Saturday, I succeeded at keeping my butt in chair but I couldn't get past four sentences on any particular topic.  So I wrote all my four-sentence ideas down, saved them all on my Shitty Draft Saturdays google doc, and hope they will, like so many scraps of ideas I have left in the margins of notebooks of 35 years, find their place in my memoir someday!

So far my 2016 has felt, at both work and at home, like successive moments of life saying "nice try!" when I put the key in the ignition. Each morning, the best intentions of what I wrote in on my calendar keep getting postponed to deal with pressing needs or distracting requests instead.

One thing that's kept me mentally grounded is a new addiction to following artists and photographers on instagram. One of my favorite photos I reposted in March was from the 24 hour project, an initiative started to "document the human condition of multiple cities during one single day".  This photo was taken probably where you would least imagine it, in Tehran, Iran.  It reminds me of the Peace Factory's brilliant little idea (if you're never seen his Ted Talk, you'll love it).

On Monday, I was proud I accomplished one thing that I thought I might not get to until July which was creating mini laminated post cards of favorite locations in the world to send to my friend Kate's daughter Scarlett for her 2 year old birthday.  I have an old playskool wooden mailbox I sent her (used in our wedding reception) but needed some mini 2 x 1" post cards that she can "mail" in the mailbox.  These came out really great! (pictured)

Another small success (in progress) has been a weekend project of updating the wordpress site we used for the wedding, beach-feet.com, with photography galleries instead. It's coming along!

Below are a couple of my favorite pictures from our New Orleans album.

This house with a spraypainted X from Hurricane Katrina repainted it into a heart. We decided to go down to Jazzfest again this April 20 - 25 and are pretty much freaking out about Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings headlining the Blues tent Friday.  Van Morrison on Saturday will be a pretty once in a lifetime, too, since the man hates touring.  Most of the rest of the time you'll find us at Fais Do Do, the Cajun stage. I'm looking forward to Taj Majal, Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats (a new artist who's on Stax Records!), Rhiannon Giddens (of The Carolina Chocolate Drops) and of course others we don't know yet!

Winter in Waterbell

Today Boston had its most sizable snow storm yet but it still wasn't ranking high on the terrible meter.  It's been pretty warm and slushy, actually.  Lots of puddles in the roads.  

For some reason the sunset tonight was looking very rose quartz and serenity blue at the same time, the pantone colors of the year.  Publicity stunt, perhaps?  : ) 

I have spent a lot of time since New Years finishing photo albums that I should have finished years ago, and in the process (maybe as a procrastination) have been sending tons of valentines to friends and family with excessive photos which was a fun off-shoot.  I still want to revise my web site, beach-feet to have photography and I'm not sure where I'll find the time to do that.

Here are a few photos of the winter so far.  All the tree and sunset photos are from a few hours ago, today.

2016

Man, I love google's doodles.  This stack of turtles really cheered my morning today.

Salty Dogs

For the third year since José moved to Boston in 2013, we have treated ourselves once a year to an airbnb rental on Cape Cod, which happens to be a converted barn in the woods like a a mini house with gorgeous beams on its ceiling, and a charming row of starfish overlooking the driveway.  The first year we spent one night here, the second year, two nights, and this year, we booked three nights, but the owner kindly offered a free fourth night as a Christmas surprise.

We have especially fond memories in this barn because the first time we were here, we were on standby to hear about Buster's arrival from Virginia and not sure if he could make it for Christmas or for New Year's (he flew in on Dec 30, 2013).  When we adopted him, his name was "Price" which he didn't respond to. Although Lucy loved having the beaches to herself that year, she would have loved even more having a playmate.

Buster was delivered via a volunteer pilot (who happened to live on Cape Cod) through Pilots n' Paws, an organization that we, and thousands of families each year are eternally grateful for!  If you post in their free forum that you have an animal needing transport from one airport to another airport, pilots will respond and offer (at no charge) to fly and/or drive your animal to you.  The pilots won't even take a tip. Talk about a rescue pup!  This is one of my favorite organizations and I can't say enough about how life-changing it was for all of us.

This year, we decided to load up the car with groceries and for two weeks I have been looking forward to the meals we wanted to cook in the apartment.  I made kielbasa with orzo and homemade sauce, and some gingerbread cookies; José made celeriac and leek soup, and pancakes with pecan butter and blueberry rhubarb jelly earlier today. We've also been pigging out on speculaas and pepernoten (gingerbread buttons dipped in chocolate) sent from our friend Jessica in Holland. Tomorrow José is roasting a pork shoulder that we picked up at a local farm right here on Route 6A and some friends are joining us from Boston.

The mutts have been utterly spoiled with canned food like sardines and salmon all weekend and are starting to stink-- although we like the smell of ocean in their fur for the first couple days. I call 'em salty dogs.  I can't wait to give them a minty bath.  We like to pick them up a tuffy shark, lobster or squirrel from the Cape Cod dog for Christmas and we crack up at how crazy they go for it.

I am always enamored with the wreaths on the pretty wooden doors on the Cape.  We often wish out loud that we could live out here year round and I think if we wish it enough times, it will work itself out.  

We were blessed to have a pre-holidays trip to California on December 11th to see both of our families there, and I spent some time on memoir research as well as visiting everyone.  My writing class is wrapping up January 15th, and my classmates all will miss the amazing support and discipline we have found in our group of 10 or 12.  I hope that we will continue meeting as 'veterans' of the first memoir generator class offered at Grub Street.  

Next year's plan (for me) is to read a ton of memoirs I can learn from, at least one book a month, and to take notes on techniques.  The first one on my list is Boy Kings of Texas. My hero in memoir writing is Mary Karr and it was a treat to hear her speak in Cambridge on her book tour last Fall.  Another author I look up to is Alysia Abbott whose memoir Fairyland is currently being adapted for the screen by Sofia Coppola.  I was thrilled to take a few classes from A.A. at Grub this year.  José is considering entering graduate school in the Fall of 2017 in microbiology but hasn't decided which school(s) he's interested in yet.  There was no time for a mixmas this Winter, but I have plans to make one in 2016! 

In case I missed sending it to you, this squee heard round the world posted by Monterey Bay Aquarium was the internet highlight at the end of the year.

Cheers, and Merry New Year.

free verse

I wandered into Forest Hills Cemetery today just before sunset, and man, it's glorious on a Fall day.  I thought I would write some free verse about the experience.

e e

in the heart of boston

protected on all sides by tougher boroughs

lives an unexpected tall wooded forest
with gravestones and chapels;

a sanctuary of souls.

i entered at ten til dusk

on all soul’s day,

astonished to see no other wandering guests,

and not a single bouquet or calavera.

must be some respectable rules about that.

still, lots of movement.

squirrels scattered and birds darted

each time i glanced down another path,

poppy

columbine

bellflower

willow

juniper hibiscus aspen

lupine lilac verbena

i didn’t see althea path where it should be.

i was just beginning to remark what a remarkably
tender and quiet place for reflection

when a security car came flying

around the corner,

chartreuse light spinning with frenzy on its forehead

and an all-business officer asked,
“How did you get up here?

we closed at four-thirty.”

it was four-thirty-three,

i had, i guess, slid in the iron gates at four-twenty-two.

the october sky was starting to drip neon pink and orange onto a pale blue canvas of clouds.

the graves here need evening peace to themselves, i thought.

something is unsettling to know e e cummings’
gravestone spells out his name in all caps.

I am stuck in a wonder:

was such a choice the harsh intention of disrespect, or simply inadvertent?

a speedy adios and abrazos

my romantic bostonian and lover of all things lowercase,

e e.

The answer to the question "How's It Going?"

Writing a memoir is the opposite of slapping the snooze on the alarm, pulling up the covers and tucking myself back into sleep in the morning.  Writing my story means rolling out of bed, facing the mirror and confronting every last one of the freckles on my cheeks.  It’s acknowledging them, naming each freckle, it’s humbly asking them more about how they got there, and what they mean.  I often pause between commas or periods and in the pause, I notice the reflection on the screen of my computer.  In the pause, my left hand always rests my chin, or its backwards fist smooshes my cheek as an automatic resting pose.  There’s something tangibly comforting in smooshing my cheeks.  My mom says I used to pose like this as a baby from my high chair while waiting for food or toys, and my family called it my “bored student” look.

It is very difficult to confront the mirror some mornings.  There are bottomless questions and true things I’m afraid to say out loud, even if only me and my typewriter* will hear it. Sometimes I have to lock myself in a quiet room in order to face the mirror (the freckles, if you will).  I've been haunting the Watertown Public Library for quiet space a lot this summer.

I've found a good way to keep this confrontation going instead of hiding from it, is to make some writing friends and make some dates that you are committed to sharing something with them -- even if it’s something you already wrote years ago and you’re improving it or even just grappling with where to put it.  My memoir class at Grub Street has thankfully given me an opportunity to have a number of these small groups of writers to keep in touch with and report in progress to when we're not regularly meeting for class.

Back to work now.

*I'm not really using a Royal typewriter although I have one. I just call my chromebook my typewriter.