Finding Joy in Snarkville

First off, there is more snow heading my way.  I woke this morning to more snow falling (though at the time of this writing it has slacked off) and predictions of a 12″ to 18″ of snow heading my way.  When I was a kid, snow days meant sitting by the fire with hot chocolate with brief moments of bundling up with ziploc bags on my feet (what — it didn’t snow much and I never owned snow boots until I was over 30) to go play or build the world’s most pathetic snowman.  As a grown up, snow days mean only one thing to me — WORK.

I work to clear the driveway (and the sidewalk). I work to entertain my child. I work to keep the fire going (I never knew how much work that was). I’m so tired at the end of a snowday that I want to crawl up into a ball and beg for summer.  Only, I don’t really.  Summer is a fine season, just isn’t my season.  I really do enjoy the starkness of leafless trees and white covered lawns.  I like it when the world turns to black and white and even the palest of colors seem bright and vibrant.

I freely admit I’m a wee bit cranky.  My darling child is home from school today unexpectedly because apparently there is some rule that there needs to be heat in his classrooms.  Seriously, I think we need to toughen these kids up a bit more — or as the PE teacher said as we were leaving “I don’t understand it, I have a coat and I’d be happy to run these kids around a bit, that would keep them warm.”  (I like him.)  Anyway, the reason I’m cranky isn’t because my baby is home today, but because when I walked in to get him he says to me, “Mom, you FORGOT that there was no school today.”  “Um, no buddy, they just called me a minute ago and told me to come get you because there was no heat.” Then not 10 minutes later in the car on the way home, “There were 16 kids in my class who mom’s sent them to school when there was school.”  My head exploded.  Please, child of mine, tell me you understand the difference between sending to school when there is no school and the school closing WHILE you are at school.  PLEASE!!!!

So, the grump has gotten the best of me (and it may also be because of a lack of coffee and a 4:30am wake-up — no, I don’t know why, I was just done sleeping); so I give you my current open letter.

Dear Neighbors:

I love this neighborhood.  Really I do.  I love the lots and the sidewalks and the houses and even the deer.  However, have you seen all this white stuff that has recently fallen from the sky?  No, it wasn’t cotton candy, it was cold and wet and we call it snow.  I noticed that as the snow was ending many of you (including me) came outside with our snow blowers and shovels and cleared driveways.  I noticed that a few of you (including me) even cleared our sidewalks.  Here’s the thing — the three of you insensitive oafs who didn’t clear your sidewalk — well, you happen to be the three houses between me and my son’s bus stop.  One of you is a teacher!  You ought to know that little ones need to walk to the bus stop and have no business walking in the street.  Oh, but wait, it gets better.

Did you know that there was also a city ordinance that says you have to clear? Well, I didn’t either, until I did some research — yup, and just like Mrs. Kravits I reported you.  Oh, yes, I proudly can tell you that I was the one who called — know why?  Because my son is the ONLY person who consistently uses the bus stop and when the snow is as deep as it has been, it can take him 15 minutes to walk 5 houses to get home.  And it wouldn’t be like that if you’d take 1/2 second and run that snow blower down the sidewalk.

When I called again this morning, because one person who got the letter and cleared the FRONT of her house, but not the side (the side we have to walk on — which is now inches deep of ice skating rink), the person told me that she heard that some won’t clear because they think they are more liable if they clear and fail than if they never cleared at all.  Well, this rumor is bunk, but has a basis in a case in the UK (please note, NOT.OUR.COUNTRY = DIFFERENT.LAWS) where a business was sued for poorly clearing.  However, after MUCH research, I’ve found that despite the fact that yes you can sue for just about anything, you probably won’t win a case where you fell if the sidewalk was attempted to be cleared.  The exception to this is that if your method of clearing is pouring hot water on the sidewalk and leaving it.  AHEM.

So, here’s what I’m going to do — since obviously not sending my son to the bus stop or to school is not an option, and I’d like to do it safely.  I think there has to be a safe way to get to the bus stop ON A SIDEWALK, and since you don’t seem to want to clear it, I’m going to help you out.  I happen to have some rock salt (the concrete hating kind, that I purchased by mistake), that I will be using to treat your sidewalk on my walks to and from the bus stop.  I’m sure that 10 pounds of rock salt will help melt the ice rink you caused by not taking care of this when it was snow and will do next to no damage to the concrete sidewalk.

Oh, I checked with the city, they said that they will charge you to repair the sidewalk if the damage was caused by over use of rock salt (as they recommend chemicals for safer ice removal).  Just a thought.

Yours,

The Queen

PS — Citizens of Snarkville, this should go without saying — so don’t write me tell me that I shouldn’t purposefully damage someone’s property — I’m NOT going to damage their sidewalk.  That would be wrong.  However, I’m not above snowblowing it myself and sending them the bill.

Let’s just face it, my idea of truly roughing it is 3 stars (or possibly a motel room with the door to the outside and bathroom in the back).  I’m not a girl that was built for serious roughing it — in the out of doors, where there is dirt and such. It might come as a bit of  shock that I once LOVED camping!

Granted, I loved it when I was 12 and frankly did 1/3 of the real work for the camping bits — and as a girl scout, I camped mostly (ok, completely) in cabins with you know beds!  I think the closest to true roughing it was a single overnight as part of a long hike thingie on one my weeks at camp in the summer.  I think I didn’t even pitch that tent.  Fits I can pitch — tents, not so much.

Well, this school year dawned with my son (pretty much all on his own) BEGGING to be a Cub Scout.  I had no desire to be a cub scout mommy — somehow though, resistance isn’t my best, I’m one of his den leaders.  Now I love exactly 1/2 the boys in my den — a few of them are wild beasts of children, but all in all it works.  Well, in the Fall there was a camp out that we went for the dinner bits and didn’t stay over (mostly because we no longer own a tent).  And this past weekend, there was a Winter Camp-In.

What is a Camp-In you ask?  Well, it appears in the land of ice and snow, camping outside with small children is cruel, so we go somewhere warm for the night.  In this case, we went to a local nature center and stayed in their exhibits.  The place is COOL.  However, setting up my sleeping area in the section between the bullfrog and the stuffed white tailed deer — not so cool! The frog was mercifully quiet (I suspect truly dead, but I wasn’t going to say anything) and I took great delight in telling people I has “Deer Butt” view for accommodations.   No, it didn’t get old (to me).

We ate dinner, went on a night hike (to talk about night vision — but sadly it wasn’t dark enough to really do that — I think we taught the boys more about light pollution than anything else), there were crafts, there was a movie (Night at the Museum, who’s shocked?) and then there was a lack of sleep.  I had to run out to walk the dog in the late night and returned to find my son (who had fallen deeply and soundly asleep in the movie) trying to find our Deer Butt ‘room’ — he was so sleepy he got lost.  He changed into his PJs and crawled into his sleeping bag and asked if I could make the other boys be quiet already.  (I see years of him being the life of the party at a sleep over ahead.)

As I stretched out to sleep myself, thanking the Scouts and the Nature Center for allowing me my air mattress, I heard the din of boys not settling in and wondered briefly, ‘How will tomorrow go?’  When my eyes opened in the morning, I woke up to most of the families already packing up (at the insanely late hour of 7am).  I began to pack up, Duke went running around.  The boys were fed sugar and milk and sent on their way home.

I think in hindsight (deer butt hindsight) the idea of camping-in is FAR better than the dirt of camping out.  However, that said, it is not nearly as much fun as camping out in the hotel.

I love my dentist.  Well, not really my dentist that I have right this minute, he has the personality of a turnip, but traditionally through my life I have enjoyed my dental experiences.  I often have to stop a new dentist or hygentist and explain, “I have NO dental fear.  Please stop telling me everything that is happening, going to happen, has happened and such.  It doesn’t make me more comfortable and the constant chatter just annoys me.”  The reality is that I tend to have spa like relaxation in the dental chair.  I close my eyes, open my mouth (when the only time words are not coming out) and zone out.  I’ve been known to nearly fall asleep with the hum of the equipment and without the aid of a single drug.  To say that I hold no fear or dread when it comes to dentist is truly an understatement.

Sadly, Prince is not of the same ilk.  He had more issues when a small child with the dentist — something about throwing up on the dentist seems to be in the story.  Recently he had to get some work done and literally came home sheet white and went to bed to recover.  I don’t think I got the depths of his fears until he walked in from that time.  Secretly, I’ve promised myself he will never drive himself to the dentist again.

Anyway, I’m convinced that my lack of fear and his complete fear are totally rooted in our childhood experiences.  I went to a pediatric dentist with a standing rule that no child ever was to know that shots were involved in dentistry. Prince went to an adult dentist who tended to give him too much gas and causing projectile vomiting.  As anyone can see, our earliest memories are SLIGHTLY different.

So, when it came to the time to begin to take Duke to have his teeth looked at; being the woman that I am, I raised my hand and said “Don’t worry, I’ll be in charge of this, I do NOT want any of *THAT* fear from you to rub off.” Prince, wisely, saw this as two fewer times to set foot into a dental office a year and agreed quickly.  The first few visits I took Duke to my dentist in Snarkville.   First, I REALLY liked him; he was good with kids (and their moms) and he had a special hygienist for kids (Sadly, she longed for kids of her own and never had any.  She poured the love of children out on every child that walked in the door — and the kids responded.)  Duke went there a few times and it was all good.

Then we moved and I feared what the next dentist would be like.  When I searched my insurance, I found that here there is a pediatric dentist in town.  Woot!!  I made an appointment and secretly wish she’d see me.  They are super patient with all the kids (even the scared ones); but they pour on the love to those who are interested in what is going on and are sweet to them.  Duke is bright and figured this out quickly and is the model of perfection from the moment of walking in the door.

This morning, we went for our second ever appointment there.  In the process of counting his teeth, one hygienist says to the other, “Teeth O and P are a little loose.” and then we moved on and chatted about 1,000 other things for 15 to 20 minutes.  The doctor walked in and chatted with Duke and me.  Duke says about 30 minutes after the counting began, “I’m ready to loose my teeth, but just two are loose. O &P.” The dentist looked up to confirm with the hygienist that he was right, that those two teeth were in fact the SLIGHTLY loose ones.  Um, yes.  Wow.  Impressed the heck out of the whole room.  The dentist explained how they letter the teeth and where it begins and ends to Duke.  Duke is mesmerized.  We all have a moment — for a second, I’m thinking about dental school by age 10, for my apparently toothy prodigy.  Then, my bright eyed, sharp as a tack son, bats his baby blues at the dentist and asks (oh, so innocently):

“Do you think I could have TWO prizes, since I knew what letter teeth were loose?”

Dental School is out — Master Negotiator School is in!!!

I’ve always been a wee bit crafty, and not in that movie mobster way.  Prince has long joked about my closet of unfinished crafts, because I spent years seeking out *MY* craft.  I have dabbled in lots of different things and while enjoying some (scrapbooking) and loathing others (cross stitch), I never grew into a love affair.

Now, about five years ago, I was finally taught to knit.  I love knitting.  I love the fiber running through my fingers, I love the pick it up put it down nature of it, I love to create something from yards of (let’s face it) string. I’ve knit sweaters, handbags, socks, shawls, and even a scarf or two.  I have a closet full of handknits in yarn waiting for their appointed hour to become something else.

Then something crazy happened. I decided to sew.

Let me back up, I have a love/hate relationship with sewing machines in general.  In high school, when my mean and horrible mother, wouldn’t buy me yet another Laura Ashley dress (yes, I said another — because seriously, my mom kept me in Laura Ashley as best she could), I decided that I was going to sew myself one.  First, on her advice (I have no memory of her actually sitting down and helping me with this project — probably because I spent the years of 12 to um — let’s not go there — convinced that she was alternating between ruining my life, didn’t care about me, and highly annoying.  On the best days she did all three at the same time.  Let’s just sum up that if she didn’t help, it could have been because I was annoying and rude; I didn’t tell her what I wanted to do really; or I have no memory of those horrible teen years), I tried to make this dress in some cheap muslin fabric to check fit or something like that.  It never made it out of that stage.  I have no idea what went wrong, but I hated the machine that I never could thread right, I  hated the dress that never fit right, I hated it all.  Briefly, I thought — ‘this is hard, I should stop’ and also, ‘why am I putting myself through this pain?’

I love to tell people that in college I earned beer money by costuming in the theater.  Well, I did — if you call costuming shopping at thrift stores and hoping things fit.  I did minor alterations — almost exclusively by hand because yet again the BIG machine in the costume shop hated me.  I am rather sure it was personal.  We are still not talking about the time I was asked to run a simple seam to join two bits of backdrop (REALLY LONG SEAM and heavy fabric) — this should have literally not taken me 30 minutes to run the seam and trim it up.  FOUR hours later, I called in help.  Why they paid me is still beyond my understanding.

Not being all that smart, I inherited my husband’s grandmother’s ‘portable’ sewing machine when we first married.  This avocado green nightmare was only portable on the moon where things are half their normal weight.  Again, I hated the bobbin and the threading.  But of course in the grand scheme of things when I begin any craft, I never believe in baby steps.  Oh, no, I completely set about to make curtains (floor to ceiling curtains) and two sofa slip covers.  I would tell you all the gory details, but my tab topped curtains were delightful in nearly every way (do not look at the seams, k?) — but the slip covers?  what a nightmare.  I got the pieces for everything but the cushions together before declaring I’m done and never touching that demon machine again.  I wrapped an pinned the cushions to cover them.  When we finally got rid of both of the sofas, I might have thrown away all that fabric because I could not face that horribleness.

So, it may have come as a shock when last year I (much more politely than in high school) asked my mom to teach me to sew some skirts.  I really wanted a good basic skirt and never found it in the stores; so I was hoping she’d help me.  I took my patterns (totally in the wrong size) to her house and we found fabric and went to work.  By we, I do mean that she did most of the work, though I did cut it out which apparently is a horrible job and needs to be given to trolls to complete. I love my skirts — well, I LOVE one of them and really like the other one — which I think is fair.  I brought them home on New Year’s Day 2009 and have been thinking about my own sewing machine pretty much ever since.

I’ve gone through all these stages with this — will I really use it? Will it be another thing to go into the closet of unfinished craft? Do I need another project creator/vice/obsession?  But it was nagging at me.  But this time it would be different (famous last words really).  This time I was going to buy a NEW machine, one that I liked and one that would do what I wanted.  I saved, I sold stuff, I made the money completely on my own.  I bought my machine.  Currently I turned my dining room into my sewing room — which does make it hard to pretend it is a dining room; but I have hopes for a real sewing space when I save the money for the furniture.

I began to stitch stuff together.  I did something completely radical — I read the instruction book to my machine.  I learned two things quickly that make sewing different from knitting — 1) the ironing; 2) you HAVE to plan ahead.  I learned that the machine portion of the sewing is actually so small in the building a project that it probably could be called Cutting/Ironing/Measuring instead of Sewing.

Then two things happened….

1. I created something.

2. It didn’t fall apart.

Zippers don’t scare me anymore.  And I’m beginning my first quilt.  Maybe clothing wasn’t my kind of sewing — but I’m seriously digging making bags and the idea of quilts.

Maybe I do have a new craft; maybe I have one that compliments the other (since, face it, I’m not going to be spinning to make my own yarn ever — that’s just crazy making to me).  I’m having fun with finding something that was expected and unexpected all at the same time.

and sometimes that season is change.

Wow, that sentence only took me months to really be able to type fully out without stopping to over think it all.  Over thinking can be a bit of a problem for me — along with perfection, sarcasm, follow through, mailing stuff, and vacuuming — but I digress.  The reality is that I had once made a promise that I was going to blog more, return to a place where I talked about stuff again and then I kept getting caught in the what to share/what not to share/what makes me happy trap.

You see what would make me happy is share everything there is to know about what is going on in my world.  I’m the sharey sort of person. The problem is that this is sort of public and not everyone who would come here is as kind and pretty and nice and human as you.  Shockingly, there are rather nasty people in this world, so I try to do things that make sense — you know like not publishing my home address or real name (though, I know you are all shocked to know that no one calls me Queen in my real life).  Those things seem obvious.  I don’t put pictures up of Duke, more for his future privacy than much else.  But I’ve never figured out where to draw a real line beyond that.  When my life gets to the point (and you know it does), that I have to make hard decisions about it, I tend to run away from my blog and then I wonder if I’ve done the right thing.

Let’s face it, if we are being completely honest, there are thousands of blogs in this world and 99% of them aren’t worth the bandwidth they are written on.  (No, your blog is completely in the 1%, I read it all the time — who are you again?) But truthfully, I’m pretty sure that my little corner of the blogsphere (SO 2007 of me to use that word), isn’t in the 1%.  I’d love to be the person who writes so well that people follow me and move through life with me.  However, I fear that both my life just isn’t that interesting and that I’m not that good of a writer.

So, I’ve been thinking lately about changes.  Changes in my life, changes in my blog, changes in me as a person.  Those are huge thoughts, by the way, and I often have to stop and get a cookie while I move through it all.  I’ve been thinking this through in my head and it is beginning to need to bubble up and come out.  I don’t even really know where to begin — but I’m moving to a new place in my brain and beginning to wonder if I’ve outgrown Snarkville.  (No, this is not a post about how I’m leaving the blog, silly, that would seem odd wouldn’t it?)

I named this blog long ago, “Join Me in Snarkville” thinking that someone out there might want to join in with my insanity, my snark, my nasty view on life.  I’ve waned from blogging because my snark began to die, my nasty view on life began to break, and I began to see light again.  I want to do more than just complain about my life, to look into the glass darkly, to see things in terms of pure snark.  That begins to weigh a person down and makes hope and joy hard to see.  (Wow, that just got deep.)  So, with a lighter heart, I’ve decided to name my little corner to —-

Finding Joy in Snarkville

My goal is changing, as it appears all things around me are —- I no longer wish to make fun of others to make myself feel better (was once my tagline, thanks), but I want to seek the joy in my daily life.  I want to share the finding of my happy once again.  And stop it, this is no pop culture, feel good, peace, love and joy schick.  Nope, not at all.  It is an honest recognition that the days truly “In Snarkville” are behind me. The days that Frankenhouse got me down are long gone.  That I’m having a harder and harder time to find constant snark in the world around me, because of no other reason than I have a hard time finding snark within me.

So, I do hope that you find this change in season a good thing. I hope that I am still up to the task of finding the funny on occasions (I seriously am not intending on being all sappy sweet all the time — that makes me gag).  But I think there is a time for Joy here.