Recluttering the House

A few years ago, we put the house up for sale intending to move to Austin to be near my son. After six months, the house hadn’t even shown once, so we took it off the market intending to try again in a few months. In the meantime, son spent most of one year in Paris and then was sent to London. His company has now opened a branch in London, and my son is working there and no longer owns his condo in Austin.

One of the first things we did when we listed the house was to pack up a bunch of odds and ends we figured we could live without for a few months. Most of the boxes have been piled in one of the two guest room closets. Then we bought an artificial Christmas tree that arrived in two big boxes which are taking up space in the walk-in closet in my office. I decided that perhaps I should free up space in the guest room by unpacking those boxes. After all, we had been living without those items for at least two years, so most of them should go to the thrift store, right?

I should know better than to expect anything to be that easy. 

First of all, there were the craft items given to us as gifts from our friends in Hungary. When I first visited and they offered to take us shopping, I expressed a preference for seeing locally made crafts. Every Christmas since, I have been receiving hand painted wooden spoons, specialty jars for condiments and honey, Christmas ornaments, ornamental plates, and one year a decorative bull whip, which is sitting in an African basket on top of the blanket chest in the living room. The wooden spoons and and a three-compartment condiment set were among the items packed, and I couldn’t make myself part with them. I compromised by getting rid of some silver plated bar tools we had been given years ago by a friend of my son, and putting the spoons where those items had been. 

Then there were the nutcrackers, which in Louisiana double as crab crackers. If we ever do have our big seafood boil, we will need them, but I made room for them by getting rid of miscellaneous cheese serving implements that we never use.

One surprise was my spring form baking pan, which I thought was in its old spot in the mud room. The baking pan is the sort of thing I don’t use often, but when I need it, there is no substitute. So it is back in the mudroom, with no obvious candidates yet to take its place in the donate box.

Then there was the small box with my elephants. Back when I went to Zimbabwe, I bought a soapstone elephant. I found a few more elephants at home to keep it company, and before I knew it, I had an elephant collection. Friends and family who know I collect elephants buy me elephants when they can’t think of anything else. A few of them were allowed to remain on my bedroom bookshelf, but several are in the small box. The box is now in a new location, though, inside antique washstand that serves as my bedside table.

Adding to the menagerie are the six painted parrots that my husband bought at Iguazu Falls. “I guess you want to keep them,” I said. “Yeah, we can use them at Christmas, “ he said. “We can hang them on the tree.” They’re about 5-6” long, but they are now in a drawer in the dining room with the Santa wall plaque waiting to see how that works out.

Then there is the mandoline that his sister gave us one year for Christmas. We never figured out how to use it and it sat collecting dust, which it hard to remove from something with sharp blades. It’s a pricey little item, though, and I hate to just give it away. We decided to use it sometime in the next few months, and if we don’t, to donate it. I know how that goes. Three years from now it will still be on the back of the pantry shelf.

I did put some old patterns and unopened packages of cording in the donate box, along with an unused spiral notebook, some ski goggles I bought to use as sunglasses in Antarctica (since they went over my glasses), a cup holder from Adrienne, Texas, the midpoint of Route 66, and a small coaster with a child’s prayer on it that I suspect was MIL’s. The box is looking quite empty.

The majority of the items are framed family pictures. I’m not sure where we used to keep them all. Perhaps new items have taken their place. I can’t really get rid of them, but at least I can get everything down to one box.

Didn’t I have a plan to declutter this space once?

Gentleman

I often wonder if more people stayed awake in English class, would there be fewer grammar fails like this?
I finally remembered the word for thinking you can control another person's behavior like this: "codependency".

A friend of mine posted this picture recently on Facebook, and I did not want to interrupt the flow of “so true” comments to say, “Grammar fail! Victim blaming!”

That’s why I have a blog, after all. So let’s take the smallest issue first. What on earth does, “I often wonder if more girls were willing to be ladies, more guys would feel challenged to be gentlemen” even mean? I think that last clause is supposed to be “would more guys be challenged to be gentlemen” or possibly “if  more guys would be challenged to be gentlemen” or perhaps in the first clause "wonder" should have been "think", but as it stands reading it is an exercise in WTF? On so many levels.

Then of course there is a larger issue (no, not the largest one, not yet) - is it women’s fault if men do not behave as gentlemen toward other men? Because, I mean, Republican debates. Michelle Bachman is out of it now, so we can’t blame her. Maybe we can blame their mamas. Their wives. The catering help. Or maybe we can expand the concept of politeness to cover how we relate to everyone, in any context, not just potential romantic partners in a dating situation. It just seems to me that if you always respect the rights of other people to be different from you, whether they are explaining their (oh so different from yours) politics or telling you no, they don’t want to come up for coffee, it would be more obvious that a man always has the choice to be a gentleman. In fact, he’s the only one who can make that choice for himself.

Men themselves have pondered the question of how a gentleman treats another man. There's the story that President Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson shut down the office in the U.S. State Department responsible for breaking codes to read messages sent between embassies of other countries and their capitals in 1929, saying, "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail." The idea that a man being a gentleman only counts in his interactions with women doesn’t make sense, considering that until recently, matters of diplomacy were only conducted among men, whether gentle or not.

Then of course there is the obvious largest issue of victim blaming. To be fair, the blogger who originally posted this picture (and identified it as reblogged . . . from dapperdean, originally from alovefromabove) did say “I fully believe this goes Vice Versa as well”. 

(I’ve revised this whole last section because what I had written before seemed both obvious and puerile.)

Of course the worst thing about the caption is that it falls into that whole category of “if only women would” speculations about how the world would be a better place “if only women would” make some change that is either very difficult, vaguely defined, or completely counter to what some other person thinks women should do to make the world a better place, if not all three. This is not to say that the world couldn’t be a better place if we women made some changes in our behavior, but that’s because the world would be a better place if we people made a difference in our behavior. Reducing our carbon footprint, thinking about what charitable gestures would better serve their recipients instead of our own convenience, learning more about the character and abilities of the people we vote for rather than just their allegiances, those are a few of the things on my list of how to make the world a better place. Not one of them requires wearing a crinoline.

For that matter, being kinder to people around you, being magnanimous when others seem unkind, noticing if there is some small thing you can do that would make someone around you more comfortable, like giving up your seat or holding open a door, are also actions that might make the world a better place. These are the actions of a lady. They are also the actions of a gentleman.  

All that is needed for a man to be a gentleman is for him to make the choice to be a gentleman. He’s the only one who can make that choice for himself.

Now This I Can Actually Afford

After my first outrageously expensive attempts to put together an outfit with Polyvore, I found one I can afford. Everything here but the shorts (which I already have) and the shoes are under $30. Oh, wait, the earrings are $135, but I don’t wear earrings anyway. I just tossed them in because they look pretty with the rest.

I don’t really need to buy the top because I have two turquoise tops, one a plain cotton sweater and the other a T shirt with glitter flowers. So I really just want the cuff bracelet, the belt, the purse, and the shoes. Well, not those shoes, I have a similar pair in mind, because they are at store near me and I need to be able to try them on. The shoes I want are expensive, but all my shoes are, because of my feet.

The purse, belt and shoes, plus the tops I already have, will also go well with my new white jeans.

The purse is interesting. It is made in India out of recycled tires. I’m trying to stifle that little voice in my head that keeps pointing out that any environmental benefit that arises from its being made of recycled materials is going to be offset by its having to be shipped from India to Louisiana. I’m also trying to stifle the little voice in my head that keeps pointing out that I have a plain black purse that is more versatile and has compartments, which is a feature I like in purses. But it just looks so perfect with the outfit. Besides, if I buy it I will be propping up the world economy. I can rationalize with the best of them.

I don’t know what it is with me and clothes these days. Thoreau once said, “I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.” I’m not sure that retirement is an enterprise, let alone one that requires new clothes. Perhaps I am a  new wearer of clothes. Thoreau seemed to approve of those.

"Some things are more important than fear."

I had not heard of the book, Allah, Liberty & Love, by Irshad Manji, until seeing this video on Pharyngula earlier today. Extremists from the group "Sharia4Belgium" stormed the author's  book launch in Amsterdam and threatened to break her neck. I don’t have anything to add to this story other than my best wishes for Irshad Manji.

Travelin' Through

January 19 was Dolly Parton’s birthday. On January 19, I was not much worried about Dolly Parton, writer of the Oscar nominated song Travelin’ Through, because I was on my way to Lafayette, Louisiana with my husband, who was attending a conference there. He was going to be gone overnight, so I decided to tag along and find ways to amuse myself.

As soon as we got to the hotel, I was confronted by large posters advertising the exhibit DINOSAURS: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries at the Lafayette Science Museum. The exhibit is a traveling exhibition organized by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in collaboration with the Houston Museum of Natural Science; the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco; The Field Museum, Chicago; and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh. 

I put “seeing bones older than mine” on my Lafayette to-do list and went. I got there to find a few busloads of school children lining up outside. Several of them waved at me as I walked to the door, and one of them held the door open for me.

Admission was $5, but senior citizen admission was only $3. I didn’t realize what a bargain that was until I got inside and saw the first item in the exhibit - the world famous T-Rex skeleton from the Museum of Natural History. The last time I saw that I was the age of the children on the buses.

I hadn’t brought my camera because I didn’t think the museum would allow picture taking, but they did. I took what dim and blurry pictures I could with my handy iPhone. Since Lafayette is a little more than an hour from my door, I may go back before the exhibit closes March 11th and take some better shots, and just look at it again.

A large part of the exhibit dealt with new discoveries in the biomechanics of dinosaur movements. There was a 1/10 size model of a T-Rex walking 

and a huge metal diplodocus skeleton designed by computer software that was first developed to model how the diplodocus may have moved. Three large screens showed pictures representing how the muscles may have attached.

A sign in the biomechanics exhibit discussed how juvenile animals may have moved differently from adults. I read it as school children ran, skipped, and bounced by me. You think?

There was also a beautiful diorama showing how what is now Liaoning Province looked 130 million years ago. Next to the diorama was a display of the actual fossils discovered there. As I looked at one I realized I had been seeing pictures of it for years. Now I have seen the actual fossil.

I’ve also seen the fossil of Bambiraptor, discovered by a 14 year old on his family’s ranch in Montana, and so many more.

An amusing part of the exhibit was a display of the packing crates used to ship the exhibit. The museum didn’t have storage space for them, so they made it part of the display. I thought that was clever, and actually quite interesting.

I don’t know how much of an impression the exhibit made on the children bouncing their way around me, but I was thunderstruck. Traveling through time to the days of the dinosaurs, I tipped a mental hat to the many scientists who bring these days to life for us, as well as the many staff and docents in small town museums throughout the country who try to educate us all, especially the juvenile members of our species, who still travel at a bounce. 

Glimpse of Gaia

You may be aware of the recent case in Rhode Island in which a teenager, Jessica Ahlquist, sued the Cranston school board for having an obvious sectarian prayer hanging in the school gym. U.S. District Court Judge Ronald R. Lagueux agreed that the prayer constituted a violation of the U. S. Constitution and ordered it to be taken down, after the school was offered a chance and refused to amend the language to remove references to “Our Heavenly Father”.

As a result, Jessica has been quite predictably* been the subject of threats and abuse. When the Freedom From Religion Foundation tried to send her flowers, two florists in Cranston refused to deliver the order. A third florist in a nearby town at first agreed to deliver flowers, then reneged when he became the subject of threats.

Finally, the owners of Glimpse of Gaia, in Putnam, Connecticut, 24 mile from Cranston, agreed to send the bouquet and added one from a Cranston, RI couple (not themselves, as I stated until corrected by TRiG).

As a result, there has been an outpouring of support on Glimpse of Gaia’s Facebook page, and people who want to support both the business and Jessica Ahlquist have been ordering bouquets, some to be delivered to Jessica herself and others to be delivered to local nursing homes and hospices, and in one case, the Putnam Police Department.

One of Glimpse of Gaia’s owners, Sean Condon, responded quite thoughtfully to the two critical emails he received. His response, and the less than thoughtful answers he got back, can be seen on the Glimpse of Gaia Facebook page, linked above.

I’m writing about this not because I want to drum up business for Glimpse of Gaia, but because I am enthralled by this outcome of hate and malice. As a result of two florists who outright refused to deliver flowers and one more who was pressured not to, strangers in nursing homes and hospices are receiving beautiful bouquets. A business that did the right thing is receiving more business. In this one instance, at least, love overcame hate.

With flowers.

*One wishes it were not predictable, but I’m not going to pretend we live in some alternate universe where it’s not. 

Summer

I have discovered a new way to waste all my time, actually two new ways. One is Pinterest.com, which led me to polyvore.com. Polyvore is a shopping site which allows you to create outfits by dragging clip art together, sort of like playing with paper dolls only without the dolls. Since I have a pair of black shorts, I decided to look for co-ordinating items, and assembled the outfit below.

When I saved the outfit, I titled it "Summer".

I wouldn’t have thought to pair the shorts with a pale gold top, but I found the hat, which led me to look for a top to match the tan stripes in the hat, and that led to the blouse. Then I looked for a scarf and that scarf! Stripes just like the hat, and yes, the predominant color is navy, not black, but there is black outlining the navy zig-zags and some of the flowers. So the scarf led to the purse and the sandals and bangles are pretty self-explanatory.

So now I want this outfit. I want this outfit despite the fact that the price of the components, minus the shorts, since I already have shorts, is around $560, which is more than my clothes budget for the entire season. $255 of that is the scarf. So if I lose the scarf (but I love the scarf), that gets it down to around $300. There is a problem with the top, though: the largest size it comes in is too small for me. Take away the scarf and the top and that leaves $160. The bangles have to be ordered from the UK, though, which means shipping costs. Besides, while I like the idea of the bangles, I don’t like the actuality of bangles. I’m constantly fighting to keep them from falling off my arm. 

Okay, so lose the bangles. The shoes, the hat and the purse together are about $150. I don’t know about the hat, though. If the crown fits, fine, but if it’s too big the brim will be down around my chin. So that leaves the purse and the sandals. I have black sandals and without the hat, top and scarf, the purse makes no sense.

So problem solved, right? I can’t buy this outfit: it’s impractical, its expensive and parts of it won’t even fit me.

Sigh. Sometimes I hate common sense.