Kindness to K Day

And now for a Random Stuff moment: I have no blog titles that start with the letter “K.” I have been blogging for nearly six years. This post is #322. And never have I entitled a post with a word that starts with K? This madness must stop. Yep, today’s the day to celebrate “K.” (Sounds like a Dr. Seuss book. I’ll go with that.)

There are lots of good words that start with K.

I could recite them for you all of today.

Without K what would I call my knees?

And my piano would have no keys.

With no K there would be no Kewpie,

Kermit the frog or Kabuki.

There would be no kittens, kilts or kites,

We would have no knitting or kisses goodnight.

We’d miss out on the word “kerplunk,”

We’d have no ketchup in which fries could dunk.

No kind kangaroos could sing karaoke,

No boards in Karate would be broken.

With no K I couldn’t keep kebabs in my kitchen

And Kansas and Kentucky would go missing…

Radio stations west of the Mississippi would start with a blank

And what would you put in your kerosene tank?

With the keyboard I’d have no knack,

And nothing to put in my knapsack.

No kimonos, kachinas, kale, keys or knolls,

no kettles and kilowatts, and no Kaiser rolls.

We would have no koi and have no Kaftans.

K would be kaput all through the land.

This cannot be.

So I offer this plea:

Let’s celebrate our friend K

Starting today.

It took six years to start a blog with a K

But elegant, graceful K, today is your day.

Today is the day we honor the K!

 

 

 

Happiness is...

...Meeting my baby nephew on Saturday. I'd thought of him every day for eight months, thinking positive thoughts for him, dreaming of the day we would meet the newest family member. We didn't know his gender until he was born. My sister and brother-in-law wanted the surprise, and so we took to methods other than the ultrasound machine to predict his gender. I used the tried and true method of gazing at my sister's adorable bump. She was carrying high, I decided, and with complete certainty I jotted a note, predicting the baby's gender. I sealed and kept the note in my wallet for more than three months, so that upon meeting the baby, I could produce my prediction with a flourish, and graciously accept people's compliments about my genius gender-prediction techniques. Well, I was wrong. The baby was not a girl but instead, a darling little boy with a dash of brown hair. It seems my gender-predicting career may need to be rethought. I'm 0 for 1. But it's all good. I knew that we would fall madly in love with the baby and that gender would have no bearing on our love. Mom predicted the baby would be a boy because he moved so much in utero. That method of analysis did not sway me, because when my mom was pregnant with my sister, my sister behaved like a break-dancing, Rockette-aspiring, head-spinning contortionist, and she was a girl.

When I got the message that a baby boy had been born overnight I did feel surprised because I was so certain that he was a girl. But within a second my surprise turned to absolute joy and I cried with happiness on the Friday morning he was born. It was one of the happiest days I've ever had, the day I learned that I have a baby nephew, perfectly healthy and strong and full of life and hope. Despite the tough time my poor sister had while growing their baby, the little guy is a champ. He's so tiny but he already has a huge place in my heart. His clothes look like doll clothes. His face is perfectly-formed. His tiny feet are the size of my thumb. He's amazing.

My sister and brother-in-law are such a good team. They are sharing the care of this tiny wonder, and they are exhausted, but they are hopelessly in love with this little guy.

I think I need another date with my sewing machine. After meeting my adorable nephew I need to get out some fabric and make a red cape because my new calling is to be Super Aunt to this beautiful, tiny but mighty, wonderful, super boy...   

 

San Diego gets a Dash of Paris

A couple of months ago an exciting idea popped into my mind: an image of me prancing around inside an Eiffel Tower costume. It’s one of the most iconic landmarks on earth and I thought it would be a fun project to try to make. This costume presented its challenges, but I can say I gave it my best try and I hope it makes people smile or laugh today.

 

 

This is the fifth year in a row that I have made my own costume. I love doing it! But there have been trade offs. I traded fun for comfort. I couldn’t sit in most of my Halloween costumes. Some included a wire structure that scratched me. Certain costumes made walking hard. Some made me sweaty. I could not use the bathroom while in costume. But all these inconveniences did not deter me from creating another fun but uncomfortable costume the following year. I either don’t learn from past experiences or I forge on anyway, motivated more by the love of creating than the love of comfort.

This costume is more comfortable than most of the others have been. The tower only weighs two pounds because I made it out of plastic PVC pipe, wooden dowels, tape, ribbon and hot glue. There is something to be said for a lightweight costume!

Well, I’m going to sign off now because there’s trick-or-treating to be done, costumes to primp, jack-o-lanterns to light and fun to be had. To all the Halloween enthusiasts out there: Happy Halloween and au revoir!

Bed Time!

…And speaking of garden beds…

(Well, we were speaking of them this spring. Okay, if we must split hairs, I was the one speaking writing about them and you were patiently listening/reading/ whatever—why again are we splitting hairs? I don’t know why you insist on such accuracy. But since I’m in such a nice mood, I’ll give ya one more chance. So please stop interrupting and let’s get back to what we were saying about garden beds…)

This spring I was obsessed about my community garden. I decided to have mercy on you and I stopped yapping about it for a while but I think it’s high time we revisited the topic. Two weeks ago I found another community garden in town. I stumbled upon it quite by accident and as you may know, that is my favorite way to discover gardens and so many other things.

This one is the Linda Vista Community Garden. It’s a bit of a secret, which is fun. It’s not on a main road. It actually butts up against a canyon, which is fantastic because then the garden plants can look through the chain link fence and see the plants in the canyon and they’ll be inspired to grow as big as the canyon plants.

This community garden has a charming feel, as many gardens do. It’s not a huge garden but so what? The fact that someone dreamed it up and made it happen is terrific. It has a hand-painted sign (yay), a small green house, repurposed materials and a funky vibe with a meandering path. It was such a treat to come across it.

For me, the crowning jewel was this real garden bed…

It's a Pumpkin Thing...

It’s Halloween season, y’all.

 

I’ve embraced it. As usual.

A few days ago I picked up fallen Jacaranda seed pods, took them home and began to paint them.

 

Their shape reminded me of pumpkins and I knew there was an art project waiting to be discovered. I like how the pods are slightly different in shape and some are not completely symmetrical. It makes the effect more charming and gives the mini jack-o-lantern faces more personality.

Enjoy the season, everybody!

Once Upon A Fence...

Some months back I blogged about a colorful mural someone painted on their fence. I drove by the fence yesterday and I saw that they’d changed part of the mural. The artist who lives there either added to the mural or changed some of it. The vintage cars remain but someone added an underwater scene to the section facing the alley. This whole thing interests me for several reasons:

1)      Public art is awesome!

2)      Personalizing your space makes your home your own, and adds flavor to the neighborhood.

3)     Painting over your own work is a newish concept for me. You are literally removing evidence that you spent time and effort on something. In the past this would have felt uncomfortable to me but I’m starting to appreciate it. We don’t necessarily create something in order for it to last forever. Sometimes we create to illustrate how we are feeling right now.  

 

Whoever lives in this house and paints this fence uses an airbrush, which yields fast results, so maybe s/he feels fine about painting over previous work. Such quick painting may be the perfect way of expressing the artist’s own development. Like wearing a different outfit each day, painting and re-painting a fence may be the artist’s way of refreshing the environment or expressing a mood.

 

Anyway, I thought I’d share some photos of this large wooden canvas that evolves along with the artist. Instead of mourning the loss of the art that was there before, I’m digging the idea that surprises regularly will be unveiled upon this fence. It’s like a giant Etch-a-Sketch (although it’s harder to shake a fence to start fresh). The creation will change but the creativity goes on and on…

 

 

There It Goes...

I’ve been AWOL. I’m sure the whole planet has felt my absence from blogging (major sarcasm). But the small but sweet group that reads my blogs may have noticed (or not) that it’s been nearly four weeks since I last blogged, and that’s longer than usual for me to keep quiet.

It’s been an extra insane month. School started, which some parents acknowledge with back flips and the happy dance. But I have mixed feelings. Yes, there’s a chunk of time in the middle of the day when I might get a few things accomplished. But before that and after that it’s complete pandemonium, so it’s a trade-off. I like the less structured vibe of summer. You float through the morning and into the afternoon and evening and even though you’re mediating an average of 87.3 fights per day, at least there aren’t the deadlines involved with school. There’s no racing to get up and get to school in the morning. No racing to get as much as possible done while they’re gone because there’s no hope of getting anything done once they’re back. Then there’s the racing to pick them up, careening through the afternoon with reminders and re-reminders and threats about homework, making dinner (or some approximation thereof), packing lunches, finding clothes for the next day, a scavenger hunt for missing toothbrushes, herding them into bed, and collapsing into my bed with a thud, like a felled tree.

Now where was I going with all this? Oh yes…Something about how crazy September has been. School started and the kids promptly got sick. This is somewhat rare for them but I suppose grammar school always includes a fog of germs hovering around kids’ heads, and they all came down with stuff. They passed it to one another, which—in a twisted way—at least confirms that they’ve heard my lectures on the value of sharing. On the other hand, it also confirms that they have not heeded my warnings on the value of washing their hands. Constantly.

While they were passing germs around, we had three batches of relatives visit—one group from another continent, one batch from another state, and one from another city. We had a major heat wave, two family birthdays, awful news about a friend who was gravely ill, several trees-worth of paperwork coming home from school, a 25-page newsletter emailed from school (I am not joking)—which I did not read but opened just to see how pages of updates I would not read--ants in the house, my sister’s baby shower, two kids’ birthday parties to attend, Oktoberfest to reschedule once Hubby got sick, and mountains of housework (that were ignored for the most part because of the aforementioned Other Stuff Going On).

What was that multi-colored blur that raced by? That was September. And there it goes…