Mindings

1. “I’d almost always rather be at” home.

2. My favorite thing for dinner lately has been “a bowl of cereal.”

3. “I suspect, when we talk, the dogs hear,” bark! bark! bark!

4. A nice long walk “is almost more trouble than it’s worth.”

5.  “Today is utterly bereft of” some good news.

6. When all is said and done, “it will be very quiet.  And still”.

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward “DVDs” , tomorrow my plans include “moving furniture”, and Sunday, I want to “have come up with that last Final exam question!”

Try to come up with something fun and different to do.  And every year our summers usually wind up being days of sleeping late and going nowhere.

Today, though, Daughter and I had a little shopping jaunt in our Downtown.  Lots of terrific little shops there;  we always spend more than we ought.

Is Rupert’s 9th birthday.

Thank goodness Daughter talked me into another dog.

1. It’s cold and “I have knitting, books and DVDs.  I’m set.”

2. “Is there anything more delightful to all of the senses than vine-ripened” tomatoes.

3. My favorite health and beauty product is “sleep.”

4. “I don’t mind” a nice long ride.  “However, I’m usually driving.  Which diminishes the pleasure.”

5. Well, first of all, “imagination.”

6. “Sam Elliott, a jewelry salesperson, one of my children’s teachers and a baby”; those were the cast of characters in a recent dream and it was “maddening.”

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to “catching up with Daughter”, tomorrow my plans include “nothing” and Sunday, I want to “finish the nothingness that went undone Saturday”!

Somewhere in the house is a set of pictures of my father.  In uniform.  Visiting his family and fiancee’ (my mother) at my grandparents’ house.

But I cannot find it.

I spent an awful lot of time yesterday looking for it.

Because yesterday, in addition to being Memorial Day, was the 9th anniversary of the day Daddy died.

I thought those photos would be nice to publish.

But they are just confounding me.

And I hate it when that happens.

1. Moving “slowly.  No need at all to hurry.”

2. “I Wanna Be”  free.  “Now, I will have the voice of Davy Jones singing this song in my head. . . “

3. My best quality is “empathy.  I think.  How do you feel about that?”

4. “Don’t obsess over the” details.  “You might miss the big picture.”

5. In nearly 10 years, “I’ve moved myself and my children forward.”

6. “Drive, with inspiration,”  is what I need right now!

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to “starting new books and knitting projects,”  tomorrow my plans include “whatever arises,”  and Sunday, I want to “watch racing all afternoon and night!”

For the past two days, I’ve been victimized by the  persistent, insistent sensation that vomiting is inevitable.  As anyone ever so afflicted can attest, when in this predicament, one wishes for the vomiting to just commence already.  It cannot possibly be worse than the feeling.

Don’t know what brought this on.  Do know that nothing, except bananas, is welcome in my stomach right now.  Even water.  It’s a drag, and it’s boring and I am truly thirsty and beginning to get cranky from hunger.

The only positive in all this is my ability to prop up in bed and watch

This.

Good to know.

1. If we had no winter, “fall would be my favorite season.”

2. “My daughter’s talent” a perpetual astonishment.

3. If I had my life to live over, “I think I would. “

4. “A month’s worth of sleep”  inside of four and twenty hours.

5. If you’ve never been thrilled, “you’ve never been a parent.”

6. To be interested in the changing seasons, “pay attention to your wardrobe.”

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to “time alone” , tomorrow my plans include “live ‘Cinematic Titanic’ in Atlanta,” and Sunday, I want to “rest completely!”

Here’s the thing, lovelets, about virtually any life endeavor.  One needs patience.

Take sewing.  Sewing should — should — be simple.  Cut fabric into pieces.  Lay pieces together, lining them up at the little inverse notches.  Sew them together.  For the last part, one can even use a machine!  Once expressly designed for the stitching together of fabrics!!  How much more simple could life make something?

Have you ever tried sewing?

Sewing is never, ever, cutting and seaming.

Sewing is basting and hem allowances and uncooperative bobbins and dogs and/or cats jumping on the foot one uses on the sewing machine pedal, causing the stitching together to go at hyperspeed.

All this while one’s Daughter sits calmly, hand-sewing a shirt she has cut out “freestyle,” because she is able to just picture things.  And she adds flourishes and quiltings and zippers without a second, third or fourth thought.

I am trying to make a tote bag.  A series of rectangles arranged in a perfectly ordinary way.

And what I’ve got so far looks like a bridesmaid’s dress that’s been through a car crusher.

Knee-high to a grasshopper?  My sewing patience isn’t even ankle-high to a grasshopper.  You could stack half a dozen of my sewing patiences on top of one another and slide them under the arch of a grasshopper’s foot.