Thanks.

Holy stocking stuffers am I ever excited for Christmas!

I always assumed that my parents were exhausted in the morning because they'd stayed up into the wee hours of night playing eggnog rummy with Santa and scooping reindeer turds off the back porch, from where they'd rolled off the slanted roof...and then later I figured it was because they'd stayed up late covering for Santa when he decided we were too old for such things. Even after figuring out a thing or two, and going to bed with a little sigh of regret that there were no more surprises left in life, now that the truth was out, I'd still wake up in the morning and dash down the hall to see that Yes! He came! Whoever he is! The stockings would be so fat with surprises that they'd crawled down from their places on the mantle and lay sluggish, hungover, by the fireplace. The gift pile, which I'd been keeping careful track of since the first of December, would have exploded to twice the size, having decided to produce offspring after all. We were spoiled rotten, we were blessed. We also had to wait. For Mommy and Daddy to get out of bed.

"GET UP SANTA CAME!" I'd yell at the top of my lungs, I'd bounce on the bed. And you know what those lazy grownups did? They pressed the snooze button.

"Just give us a half hour and then we'll get up." One of them would mumble from a drool covered pillow, and I'd groan, and complain. It wasn't fair. All those beautiful shiny wrapped packages crying out to be opened, admired, and played with, and these two heartless creatures just lay in bed, snoring like it was any other day. No, any other day they would have been up, drinking coffee, bickering, making breakfast. It seemed that Christmas day was, for them, the one day out of the year when both parents would sleep in to the tortuous hour of nine. NINE! Can you believe it?

One year my mom said I could open one present while I waited for them to get up, and I misheard her. They found me surrounded by discarded wrapping paper and toys - all of them - and I held up a doll. "Look what Grandma gave me!"

Another year my sister tied me in bed and promised to free me at seven o clock. The torture! She actually had the nerve to go down the hall and come back, reporting matter of factly, "Santa came, and the stockings are so full they're sitting on the ground."

Another year I shared a room with my brother - he was about three or four, and I was a disillusioned teenager. He would not go to sleep. "Go to sleep or Santa won't come," I reminded him. He was silent for a little while, and then my dad walked down the hall outside our room.
"Did you hear that? I think it's reindeers on the roof!"


Anyways...a new truth has surfaced. Santa has come and gone, and I am still awake. Why is this? I am so excited for Edie to open her presents! I think I might be more excited for Edie to open her presents than I ever was to open mine. Is it possible? Probably not. But still, I can't sleep. I am a geek. I went to RadioShack today to replace the batteries in the old Minolta Uncle Lee gave me. The Pentax has black and white film in it and the Minolta has a roll of Fujicolor. I finally tracked down the camcorder charger and it is plugged into the wall. As I type this, I realize how fortunate we are, how spoiled. Sorry for complaining about the snow. Sorry for being jealous. There are people spending their holidays inside of an airport, wearing the same clothes from last week, I hear. We are warm and well and with family and there is a homemade stocking full of goodies waiting out there for Edie to wake up. She'll be sweaty headed and rosy cheeked and bright eyed and I'll get to be surprised all over again.

Did you hear that?

Kenneth and I had some "decaf irish coffee" which we strongly suspect may not have been decaf after all. His dad prepared the grounds, and I'm not sure Grandpa Hopper even allows "decaf" into his paradigm. There is a jar labeled decaf, but for Grandpa Hopper it probably appears all pixelated, like a censored face on Cops.

We were laying in bed, grinding our teeth and whispering about Christmas, and I told him about my brother listening for reindeer. "Did you hear that!?" I repeated, to demonstrate without saying as much that I was, in effect, as excited as a three year old boy listening for signs of Santa.
Kenneth was getting irritated, though, because he wanted to try and get some sleep.
"That's just the rain, dear. Now go to sleep."
"The reindeer!?"
And he laughed, because he hadn't even meant it like that. Random stroke of genius.


Good night, sleep tight. Don't let Donner or Dasher bite.
And Merry Christmas.

Love,
Kendal

Snow day...

More like a No Day.

I'm trying to be positive about LA but dangit why does the first big snow storm in YEARS have to happen the one winter I am away from the Northwest? My daughter's first winter?

Sure, it's cold here. It's even so cold I can finally wear socks with my shoes, and gloves on my hands. We even have the heaters on. But I miss the snow. Everybody I talk to tells me about the snow! the snow! the magical beautiful wondrous snow! I am getting jealous. I am worried that it may never snow again. My daughter will have missed her one chance to experience snow because we made the dumb choice to live in LA for a little while...just long enough to miss all the good stuff.

Ugh. Gotta stop thinking this way. There is a Ray Bradbury story which has haunted me ever since I read it long long long ago. I think we even saw a made-for-tv adaptation of it in Mrs. Cotton's fourth grade class. It's awful. It takes place in an elementary school on Venus, where it rains ALL THE TIME. The children have to take daily treatments of artificial sunlight to avoid rickets or jaundice or whatever diseases spring from having no vitamin D in the body. The thing about Venus is that the sun only comes out once every 7 years, for just a few hours. None of these kids are old enough to remember what the sun is like, except for one girl who moved to Venus from Earth more recently, and can therefore remember the sunlight. She talks about it to no end, and it really pisses the other children off. They think she's bragging, or making it up. So they play a cruel trick on her. They lock her in a closet on the day the sun is supposed to come out, just for a minute. They just want to scare her a little bit, but then the sun comes out and they all get distracted and run outside to play. In the TV program, suddenly blooming flowers surround happy, laughing children as they run through green fields in the sunshine, then cut away to a girl screaming and pounding on the door to be let out, then back to the happy laughing children, until the sun goes behind a cloud, a thunderclap claps, and all the children then remember their classmate, locked away, and they run to let her out but it is too late.

She is broken when they open the door. Seven more years of rain.

So yeah, I can be overdramatic about things, certainly. Sure, it'll probably snow again next year, and maybe it will even stick. If we're lucky, it might even snow when we come up in January for Edie's birthday. But I can hear you all up there, laughing and throwing snowballs and cozying up under blankets by the fire. I see your pictures, of your loved little ones all bundled up for their first big snow day. Meanwhile, we'll put on our sunglasses and drive to the beach to catch some chilly rays of sunlight...just because we can. We probably won't even need scarves. How about THAT, Seattle, Portland, and New York? There's still leaves on our trees!

When parenting advice from strangers comes in handy

"Those bloomers are so great...especially when she learns how to take her diaper off." - random stranger.

Well, she figured it out. Just a little elbow grease applied to the velcro tab, and voila! Naked Time!
And those bloomers...they really are so great. Someday Edie may figure out how to get the bloomers off, but I'm hoping that by the time she does, she'll be too exhausted to pull off the velcro tab.

and also?

Happy Holidays!

I forgot to mention

Edith Emily is in the habit of practicing new words upon waking, every morning. One morning she woke up, rolled over, smiled, and said, "Grah....Pah," a bit shyly. She is reticent with her new words, they tend to be a bit fragile until strengthened by repetition. But in the calm of morning, after everybody has gone off to work and the house belongs to us and the animals, new words are free to float out of her mouth, syllable by syllable. It is so fascinating to see how she breaks everything down into simple syllables, building blocks of English. A couple of days ago I was reminding her, not so gently myself, to be gentle. "Gentle, Edie, gentle! PLEASE!" while fending off miniature slaps to the face. She recently learned how to give a high five, but not that the high five is best limited to another person's hand only. She high fives my face, my chest, my belly, and then tugs my hair for good measure. After being headbutted in the mouth one too many times, I found myself yelling, "GENTLE! GENTLE! BE GENTLE WITH THE MAMA/CAT/BOOK/etc!"
And she tentatively mouthed, "dehhhh...teh," which sounded just like the way we say gentle, drawn out while we show her what a gentle touch looks like.

Today was my favorite new word day so far. She woke up, stretched, and rolled over to find Siddhartha heating the bed beside her. She patted his fur and said, "Dah...tha."
She said it several times more, and when we went out to tell Grandpa, who stayed home sick from work, the news, she demonstrated her new prowess with language by swaying her hips in rhythm with the word. "Dah....tha. Dah....tha. A-Dah....tha."

What a joy to know this little person, and watch her grow, tumbling out from herself in new directions every day. Thanks, Life. I am lucky beyond measure.
There's more here...

hmm.

Okay...Maria inspired me. She just blogged about how she hasn't felt like blogging lately but that she'd at least try and I have been feeling the same way but I also should at least try. Another thing? Her blog is called Kicking Ass and Taking Temps and I think I may have unwittingly lifted the rhythm and syntax from her blog title for mine - Lemon trees and dirty streets. Sorry, Maria. It was the first thing that popped into my head when I was setting up this blog. It's kind of like writing a song and getting excited about it because it is so good, and then you realize that it's already a song, written by somebody else. I just hope that my blog posts are mostly original thoughts, beamed directly in from outer space.

Yeah. I haven't felt much like blogging lately, but I should at least try. Wait....that sounds familiar. Dangit again! We all do it once in a while.

I've been knitting a lot. Although, it doesn't seem like I've finished anything lately. Oh wait. Here it is.

The Christmas Stocking before getting hotwashed, as a cozy sleeping bag:
And here is The Christmas Stocking, after being shrunk in the wash, smelling of a day at the sheep pen, still damp.

The colors turned out being a little bit silly. See the stripes on the right? Those were supposed to last for the entire stocking. But they didn't. That stocking consumed every last bit and then demanded more. MORE! So I fed it the last of my very soft, very cozy, Glazed Carrot Malabrigo Worsted Merino, but still it wanted MORE! I tried to feed it that recycled sweater wool, but the color was funky, the texture all wrong. An emergency trip to the Yarn Store never hurt anybody except for my credit card debt. There, I decided not to try and match the original colors, but instead went with a deep blue and grey that looked good with the orange. (I thought.)

Here is a funny excerpt from a web show that a friend of mine just linked to on Facebook:


All that's left for me to say is that don't ever feed the seagulls at Hermosa Beach. I learned the terrifying way. It was like a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. All I remember was throwing a chunk of croissant to one gull and the rest is a beaky, mangy, squawking cloud of greed and desperation. Thanks, California. I can check running from seagulls, in absolute terror, while screaming for the baby's and my life, off of my list of things to do before I die.

I hope you are still reading. Thanks for hanging in there. Hope your holidays are shaping up, despite everything, to contain nuggets of joy. We here at the Inglewood Hacienda are slowly collecting the cheer, giftwrapped surprise for Edie by rediscovered vintage holiday postcard collection by cup of contraband hot chocolate.

What special moments are making their way into your holidays?

funny baby, funny dog

Emily's new game is going into Grammy's room and getting on her treadmill, then trying to walk in place, with varying degrees of success. (while the treadmill is off, of course)

Peggy Dog's new game, apparently, is hide and seek. We were hanging out in the back yard, just picking up pinecones and sticking them in our mouths and stuff, pulling Gertrude's tail, you know....and I realized that Peggy wasn't around. I thought I could hear her barking though.

"Peggy!"

"Bark bark bark!"

"AAAAAAH!" says Emily.

"Peggy!"

"Bark bark bark!"

"AAAAAAH!"

and so on until I realized that Peggy was not going to come running in answer. That is unusual for her. Maybe she was trapped on the other side of the fence in our neighbor's backyard, somehow. That's what it sounded like. I ran into Grammy's bedroom to call Peggy from her bathroom window. Peggy answered from right outside the window. So I ran back outside, scooped Edie up and went to the front, to see if Peggy had gotten into the neighbor's yard. Their gate was locked, though, and when I peeked over the fence I could only see squirrels. That only left one place we hadn't actually checked, the narrow area between our back yard fence and the house on the side. We went back through the house and walked around the side of the house to check. No dog.

"Peggy!"

and in answer, she came bolting out of a square hole in the bottom of the house, pushing aside a loose screen and bouncing with excitement. She'd been under the house, and I would almost think she'd been trapped there if she didn't seem so excited when she got out. She tore around the yard a couple of times and ran up to me playfully - I've never seen her like that before. I think she had been playing a game with us. Hide and Seek dog.

take two

well...nothing is as easy as it seems at first. It seems that I was engaging in some wishful thinking when I read the label of the sweater that said 70% wool, 20% mohair, and 10% nylon. I was thinking that perhaps the 10% nylon referred to the band of fabric knit from a narrower yarn which formed the collar of my thrifted sweater, and not a percentage of nylon present in the yarn that makes up the entire sweater. I unraveled most of both sleeves until the yarn broke and I threw one cuff in the washer to see if it would felt. It wouldn't. It got a little bit shorter, but aside from that it seems perfectly machine abusable. The yarn also untwisted into a flimsy four parallel strands. My recycling enthusiasm went too far here, as I realize that the sweater probably would have made a better sweater as was than as is. At least I can use the handfuls of sweater ramen that I gathered for some Kool-Aid testing, since my first time dying yarn will surely not be as easy as I expect. Plus, I think I need to get a nice brown to compliment Edie's blue and purple stocking. There is no brown flavored Kool-Aid so I'll have to muddle some flavors together until they make poop soup.

The good news is that the perfect sweater sent me a mental telegram today, asking me to please come and pick her up from the thrift store. I dragged Kenneth and the baby out of the house, and Kenneth helped me sift through all the 100% acrylic sweaters until he got bored and wandered off into the baby clothes. I found two mens sweaters made of 100% lambswool, too fine to unravel but perfect for felting. I can use the felted sweaters to make something like this or whatever. Edie has an adorable dress made from a felted purple sweater that I found at Lily Toad in St. John's. Then I found the perfect sweater. 100% wool, chunky enough to see every stitch, hand knitted and seamed, and well loved by somebody who knew how to treat a sweater. It wasn't until I was happily unraveling one of the sleeves that I felt a pang of guilt - the sweater was well crafted, with bobbles and cables and panels of moss stitch and wooden buttons and ribbing. Who am I to say that Edie's first Christmas stocking is worth more than all that hard work? Actually, I rescued it from the thrift store for four dollars and I knew where not to cut this time and so I guess it is up to me to decide that this wool is done being a sweater and ready to become a holiday tradition. It's just that from the smell of things (smells just like my mom's old doll clothes that I used to love playing with), the sweater has been a sweater for a long long time. Life goes on. It really does! As I was pulling the crispy loops out of one another, it occured to me that the sheep who gave its coat to make this coat has been dead a very long time. How amazing that a piece of that sheep's life can live on in a sweater, and then change color and become a stocking (and probably some toys too, since one sleeve is about all I need for the stocking) long after the sheep itself has been repurposed into somebody's dinner, and that somebody probably also has become something else by now. I wonder what things will outlive me?

oooh anticipation

I just returned from Vons with roughly 20 packets of Kool-Aid with which to dye portions of my as-of-yet still un-unraveled white sweater. As soon as I figure out which strings to cut I will make piles of sweater ramen, gather them into loose skeins, and make candy out of them.

knitting and knitting and walking.

I have been knitting so much lately that my hair resembles handspun yarn. I thought that was so clever that I set it as my Facebook status. In case you are reading it for the second time.

I'm working on a felted Christmas stocking for the Wee One. Silly me, I've never felted wool before and so there are a few things I might have done wrong. Felting is actually called Fulling, and it means you accidentally shrink something woolen in the wash, on purpose. Because it's going to shrink, you knit it up to be ENORMOUS before you shrink it. Really a silly thing to do, but when it's all done, you have a nice felty fabric, which is sturdier than a knitted fabric.

First of all, I started out with not enough yarn. I am using a gorgeous blue that goes from light to dark as you knit, and a really squongy skein of handspun, handdyed, handfound yarn that Kenneth rescued from a busy street for me as I watched him from the sidewalk, hot cocoa and hotdogs in hand, baby in belly. It was all dirty and decorated with little bits of dried brown leaves, so I didn't recognize it as being a nice pretty bit of mauve yarn until beginning this stocking project. Well....I am almost out of yarn and I haven't turned the heel yet. So far it is an ankle warmer, which everybody ought to know won't hold any of Santa's treasures unless his elves affix some velcro to the toys. I'm racking...wait, is it wracking? I'm wracking my head to find a skein of 100 percent animal hair in a nice color that will go with forget-me-not/hydrangea bush scheme I've got going, and then I remember a sweater that I bought at the local thrift store for five bucks. It's huge and white and has the right kind of seams for unraveling into piles and piles of yarn. It's part sheep and part rabbit. So I finally went online to see if angora will felt along with wool, and sure enough it does. But then the nice lady in the website goes on to tell me that a smart felter only uses yarn from the same company, to ensure even felting. And that a smart felter uses needles way bigger than the ones I am using. Oops, and oops. So I guess we'll see how it turns out. But first, I have to unravel a sweater and learn how to dye a skein of yarn.

In other, more interesting news, Edith Emily Amargosa Pants is a certified WALKER! We took her to her Grammy's favorite doctor yesterday, even though he doesn't see children anymore. Grammy pulled some strings and got us an appointment. Secretly I think she just wanted to show off the grandbaby to the family physician. He was cut from Family Physician cloth, alright! If you could go deep inside your psyche, riffle through various archetypes and stereotypes, and find your first idea of "doctor", you'll find Dr. Peterson. He's white-haired, wry, witty, and before the exam he sits you in his wood paneled office to talk. Wooden shelves filled with carved wooden ducks, and a regal portrait of a dog with a dead duck in its mouth oversees business. The only thing missing was a pipe filled with cherry-vanilla tobacco, but you know the rules....California and smoking. Anyways, we were waiting in the room designated for such activities as browsing National Geographic, filling out paperwork, and waiting, and I was admiring the carpet, which was a lush green and brown plaid, and which Kenneth assures me has been there since before he was born. (Dr. Peterson delivered both Kenneth and his brother Joseph) Edie passed the time by standing up and taking one step, then another, then wobbling a bit as she decided whether to continue or to fall, then two more steps as both of us watched! The kid has excellent timing, whether it's heading for the birth canal just after her auntie arrives in town, or waiting until both of her parents are present and attentive to take four steps on her own.

Since then, she's crossed rooms with her newfound confidence. It is such a joy to see the light blink on behind her eyes as she realizes that she can do this thing that has for so long eluded her. It's as if she could do it all along, and she just had to realize it.

Of course, I can't find my video camera battery charger, so another milestone gets recorded in words, and on the pages of her journal instead. We did take a couple of short movies on the camera.

a scattering of thoughts about thoughts

We were on a walk today, with Peggy dog on her leash, Edith Emily in her sling. I could smell the rain coming. Wind was blowing, and the colors seemed extra vivid to me. Wherever I looked I noticed interesting combinations of colors - dark purple berries on a forest green bush, the sudden florescent spattering of fallen leaves on a bright lawn, sun faded tan adobe walls flush against sun faded bricks, the light grey of concrete as a backdrop for a teal painted iron fence, some lavender blossoms - and I realized I was imagining the colors as skeins of yarn. Hand dyed hanks of the colors I saw around me on a day whose sky was greyer than the rest. I have been thinking about knitting a lot lately, and knitting a lot as well. Ravelry provides an endless source of fascination, as nearly everyone in the world currently using wool to make things seem to have a profile on there, with pictures of finished projects, yarn stashes, and hand dyed, handspun fibery goodness. Then there are the knitting blogs....

But anyways, I did not open this posting box to write about knitting. I wanted to express somehow, the thoughts that swirled through my head this afternoon as Peggy dragged us through the neighborhood, nose first. It seems like whatever my mind is tuned into, becomes the way I see. I do not remember ever noticing colors so vividly before. When I was taking a lot of pictures, I would notice interesting colors, but they were always part of a larger scene - something with visual interest beside color - form, content, light and shadow, whatever. Today was different because it was so specific to just color combinations. I realized that I haven't been writing as much (yes I know, nanowrimo actually took too much joy away from the writing process and I turned to knitting instead. told you something like that was bound to happen...) lately, but when I was writing pretty regular blog entries, my thoughts on walks like this were more word oriented. I would spend mental energy thinking about how I would describe something, and sifting through the day to find interesting situations worth writing about. So now that my thoughts have been tuned to knitting, the pieces of the world that I perceive the most happen to be color and texture oriented. Forgive me if I am repeating myself, I'm just circling what is probably a very simple concept.

Different people perceive the world differently. We probably all know this, to some degree. Yet it's a hard thing to really know. I am constantly surprised when another person reveals that no, they are not on the same page as I am. Because I'm only looking at one page, I forget that there are words on the other side. I have never had any interest in sailing, but my cousin has an album full of sailing photos on his facebook page. He's also a commercial pilot. Which reminds me of a friend of mine's father, who has participated in sailing races and also got his pilot's license a few years ago. He and his wife live on a private runway so he can fly his plane whenever he wants. Today it was windy, like I mentioned, and to me that means that my skirt flaps around on our walk, Edie wears a hat, leaves eddy up into momentary swirls of color, and the trees dance. A windy day is beautiful to me, and exciting to walk through. I was thinking today, after noticing how I was noticing colors especially, that on a day like this my cousin or my friend's dad might have some extra perception regarding the wind. The direction, the quality, how fast, how cold...things that don't matter much to me necessarily, because I am just walking around going gaga over the color of things. But if I could jump into somebody else's head, what bits of the world would I notice especially much? The sound of things? The way it smells? How healthy the plant life is? What kind of birds are singing? The make and model of every car that passes? The price of cigarettes at the corner store?

What if we were aware of all the details, all at once?

Today I finally remembered to water Kenneth's garden while he was at work. I turned on the sprinkler and ran inside to try and squeeze a shower in while Edie napped. She woke up screaming before I could turn the water on, and I ran to comfort her wearing my towel. She was inconsolable for a long time - she hadn't been ready to wake up when she did. Finally she calmed down, though she was clingy, and I remembered the sprinkler. Ran outside and turned it off, but the garden looked like the flooded farms of the midwest. Gurty drank from one of the pools between the rows of kale. And now it is pouring rain like LA thinks it's Portland.

this might sound crazy...
but I actually think Emily is trying to pretend she has long hair when she drapes yarn around her neck. Tonight she placed a few strands in their usual spot, and then started tugging her hair. Plus, she acts really girly when she plays with the yarn. You can blame Grammy, because she sure doesn't get that girly stuff from me.

The fires

The sky is yellow.
The air smells like campfire, and it tastes acrid.
Everything is dusted with ash.

Today we will stay inside.

baby movies

baby movies

One of Emily's more unfortunate favorite activities is to drape yarn around her neck. She will crawl over to me when I am knitting and grab the yarn between me and the skeins, and loop it over the back of her neck like she is putting on a necklace. She is so methodical about it, she must think she is doing some kind of grown up activity, but I can't think of what she might be imitating.

Just in the time I've taken to write this, she's put about four loops around her neck.
Oh, Kid! I'm going to have to knit her a little scarf that she can drape around her neck all she wants.

She waves now, at everybody. It's really cute.
She also says Kitty Cat, Dog, Dada, Mama, and Grandpa. Of course, it's not that obvious. It's more like "Kkkhhkcat" and "Gah Puh". Still. It's an exciting time to know this kid.
She's also kissing and hugging a lot more. She used to like giving the cold shoulder when we went in for the kiss, but now she's all about it. This morning she woke up and started kissing my face right away. Awwww....cuddly baby. I'll have some more pictures up on Picasa soon.

It's a good time for pep talks.

Thanks, Neil Gaiman.

I hate the novel so far. I don't even want to write novels! I thought I'd be writing fast and furious memoir stuff, about things that really happened, because you know that's what I know and they say to write what you know. Plus I am my favorite main character! My life is my favorite plot!

But I had trouble with the fast pace, trying to get every precious little detail of my precious little memories in line just right, so I had to make somebody up and make her go do stuff that I didn't do. The good news? I still have an imagination! I can still make pictures in my head of places I've never been!
The bad news? It's a load of crap, so far, and doesn't carry the emotional weight that it would if it were MY story happening. But I have to just get out of the way and type this dreadful thing, because I said I would. Bleah.

Where are my uninterrupted stretches of writing time for NaNo!!??

I'm so far behind. Like, 10,000 words behind.

Ah, so this is what true, deep gratitude feels like. I have been truly, deeply grateful in the past, the last and biggest example being that time I held a brand new soul in my hands as she took her first breaths and told her "thank you for being here, for choosing us." And of course there have been plenty of moments since that one where I took pause and realized how lucky I am. (remember when you helped me attend Literary Star class?) It happens whenever that above-mentioned, still pretty new soul falls asleep after nursing, arching her body, smacking her lips a couple of times, and letting out a deep sigh before becoming perfectly still for a blissful stretch of time. When she sleeps, her face glows from within, and she looks like a completely different creature than the animated, squirmy, laughing and wild Edith Emily who grows faster and faster every day. I say a quick and silent thank you before getting up to do the things I cannot do when she is awake. I say thank you other times, for other things - these past few rainy days in LA have been heaven, getting out to walk the dog, our new bike seat and thus freedom, and new friends in town.

This gratitude right now is so different. This is the gratitude of a collective spirit, a world holding its breath to see about renewing that hope for the future. I have learned to be grateful for the blessings I have received; I have tried to be grateful for the blessings that others receive and sometimes succeeded, sometimes held hands with Lady Jealousy at the same time; and now, finally, I can feel the gratitude that belongs to us all.

For some odd reason, it gave me the energy to unload the dishwasher, throw the diapers in the wash, load the dishwasher, and wipe the counter tops, just in the last hour! Usually that constitutes a day's work for me, dragging my sad and homesick self between the chores and the couch while the baby makes do with a floorful of toys.

The effects of happiness are instantaneous. Hope for the future does wonders for a body. I feel ten years younger, twenty five pounds lighter. I'm not sure, but I think I might be falling back in love with America, that crazy b$@!* I am so grateful to be alive today, and that my daughter's first years will be spent in a changing society, under the leadership of the first African American President of the USA. As she grows older, I look forward to telling her stories about this election - how more people than ever before came out to vote because we were ready for a big change, a good change. The work is only just beginning, but I am so excited to see what we can make with this time, with this country.

At the same time...
Yes on 8? Come ON, California! You are losing some major cool points with me. As my friend Salvez pointed out, Oregon also has farmer's markets and ocean beaches. Equal marriage rights for same-sex couples was one of the only things that gave you an edge besides all the frozen yogurt places and the show Californication. I am very very disappointed in you, California, and I am counting down the minutes until we are on our way back to Pabst Blue Ribbon Beaver Bridge Town, where the air is clear, and the tap water drinkable.

NaWoAmMo

dangit, I really and truly believed that a Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius would just fly from my fingertips and onto the page, happy to finally have been set free. Doh. I started writing about one thing. Then I got bored with it after about, oh, like a blog's length. My attention span is not what it once was. Was it ever? Hm. So I kept at it, writing crappy scenes that didn't connect to one another. After about 2000 words, I started a new novel. This one was much easier to write like a story. I used the third person and changed "I" to a character named "_____". Still a true story, but now it seemed like fiction. After a page of that story, I got bored again. Just now I had a great story idea in the shower, one that would be ACTUALLY fictional, but that I could easily pretend myself into. But maybe I need to practice sticking with the original idea for a change. I really do seem to be more of a sprinter than a long distance marathon writer. Pace yourself, Kendal.

Anyways, though roughly half of my word count is crap, or little admonishments from my internal editor (what the heck? she was supposed to go stay in the Internal Editor Kennel for the month. She keeps escaping!) about what a crappy excuse for a story I am trying to write, I have 3480 words now, including both story starts and the third idea. Nothing fits together. Maybe they should rename it National Word Amassing Month, because I think the term "Novel Writing" is rather misleading.

At least there are the pep talks to look forward to:
I received this message in my inbox yesterday...

"Dear Writer,

Howdy! NaNo Program Director Chris Baty here. Welcome to the 10th NaNoWriMo! It's great to have you on board.

I'll be sending you one of these emails each week from here until the end of the event. Between my emails, you'll also get two encouraging missives from our panel of celebrity author pep talkers. This week, you'll be hearing from Jonathan Stroud and Philip Pullman.

Okay. Enough chit-chat. It's time to talk geodes.

Geodes, for the geologically disinclined, look like normal rocks on the outside. But when you cut them open, they're filled with all sorts of wonders—bubbly layers of agate, sparkly crystals, elves.

As a kid, I was obsessed with geodes. The highlight of my year was a visit to Dick's Rock Shop in Fountain, Colorado. The owner of the store, Richard Stearns, had a crate of dirty, unremarkable, tennis-ball-sized rocks in his Geode Bin. You'd spend an hour hunting through them until you'd picked out the perfect dirty, unremarkable rock.

Richard would then fire up his slab saw and cut the thing in half for you. The machine screamed and spit water to cool the blade, and it was messy and slow. Most of the time, Richard would lose a finger in the process.

That's how I remember it anyway. The details are a little fuzzy after so many years.

When he was done, Richard would present you with both halves of your geode. They'd be wet, and sometimes you'd gaze down into a glittering concavity of purple or green. Other times, you'd cry because you'd stupidly picked one of the geodes where the all the crystals were caked with a calcified layer of elf spit.

As we head into NaNoWriMo, I'm reminded of the feeling I got standing in Dick's Rock Shop, watching as that year's mystery stone revealed whatever magic it possessed. After nine NaNoWriMo novels—most of which have trended more towards elf spit than gemstones—I still get an excited stomach-flutter at the start of November. I can't help but feel giddy as I ponder questions like: Will this be the best novel I've ever written? And, secretly: Will this be the best novel ever written in the history of humankind?

Because it really could be.

Then the writing starts, and by the second sentence, two new questions have occurred to me. Namely: What am I doing? And: Could this be the worst novel ever written in the history of humankind?

And you know what? It really could be. But that's fine. Trust me on this. Don't waste your time measuring the success of your NaNo novel by the sparkle of your prose or the rock-solid genius of your plot. The books we write in November won't start out like the novels we buy in bookstores. Because the novels we buy in bookstores didn't start out like bookstore-novels either.

Nope. They started out as way-less beautiful, way-more exciting things called first drafts. These are the dinged-up cousins to final drafts, and they're packed with crazy energy and laughable tangents and embarrassing instances where a main character's name shifts six times over the course of a single chapter.

Creating this reckless, romantic, and potential-filled beast is the first step in writing a great book. It's also a fantastic workout for your imagination, and monkey-barrels of fun. There's a catch, though. Getting through a first draft will require you leave perfectionism and self-criticism at the door. Fear not: We'll keep them both safe and return them to you in December.

But in November, you are beyond criticism. Because you are doing something that few people in the world have the guts to try—you're packing a huge creative challenge into an already-hectic life. You're juggling work and home; family and friends. With all of that going on, you've signed up for NaNoWriMo. Where you've spent the last few weeks hunting through the bin of possible novel ideas, trying to pick out the perfect one. Maybe you've got yours already. Or maybe you feel like you're not quite ready.

You're ready.

It's November 1, writer.

What say we fire up the ol' slab saw and find out what's in there?

Chris
NaNoWriMo"

Can this guy write or what?

Back to the typing board.

Happy Halloween! And NaNoWriMo!

Well. In less than 25 minutes I will set off for uncharted territory. Last week we brought home an uncarved pumpkin and now a sweet little owl sits on the porch, created in a mad dash to pack as much Halloween fun into the few hours between naptime and bedtime as possible. It was my first experience carving a pumpkin under the time/space/supervisory constraints of having a young child nearby, throwing pumpkin guts on herself, myself, and the dog. Less than five minutes, it took, and the results are more than satisfactory, in fact it is my favorite Owl-O-Lantern I've ever carved! I think it provides an apt metaphor for the weeks to come.

Sitting in front of me, in the ether, is what the zen people call the Uncarved Block. An Unwritten Novel. I just have to uncover it by hitting a bunch of random keys until the word mark has been reached. Then I'll have surprised myself. Maybe I'll even surprise the novel, who was sitting around drinking whiskey inside of the whale's belly, fully aware that it may never live to see the moonlight or feel the wind on its beard ever again, before I maced the whale in the eyes and caused it to heave the contents of its guts all over this computer screen, or something like that.

Before I begin, however, I want to take a couple of minutes to tell you about the fabulous day we just had.

Kenneth installed a new child seat on my bicycle. We bought a wee little helmet for Edie, yellow with chickens. I'm sorry there is no picture. I forgot to bring the camera. So there are no pictures of Edie's first bike ride, but I have words for you.
Seagulls pecking at mussels
Pelicans diving beak first
Doggies, doggies, and doggies.
Cheering with the exhilaration of FINALLY going fast! On a Bike!
Edie cheering along, "WOOOOO!"
And waving to doggies.

In Venice we lost the trail. Rode a little way down the boardwalk and back, met the King Overlord of All That is New Age. Really. He was amazing. I'd tell you about him but I think he might show up in the novel, and do you know how much stories hate to be repeated before they are shown to their rooms for the night? Oooh, there is ten minutes left.

Quickly now, there is the pumpkin carving marathon that I mentioned, and then there is us taking Edie out "Trick-Or-Treating" in a shameless ploy to relive childhood and amass vast quantities of cheap sugary treats. My half of the loot is dedicated to the Noveling process, a very important cause. In the nine minutes I have left can I just tell you that the first place we trick or treated at, an apartment building with big open doors and sidewalk chalk arrows pointing the way, the tenants were gathered in the courtyard around a candlelit table filled with sushi, wine, various other dishes, and jello shooters. That's right, I said Jello Shooters. They were for the parents. That's us. Parents got jello shooters. Grammy didn't believe us when we came home but then the tiny plastic cup with jello remnants fell out of the treat bag. The woman who gave us the jello shooters told us that her husband used to take the kids trick or treating with a shotglass for himself.

Sometimes the best parenting advice comes from the most unexpected places.

Okay I think I'd better rest my fingers for FIVE MINUTES!!!!!!

Let the Novel Writing begin!

Aw, the great Inglewood Adventure continues.

you see, we don't actually live in LA. LA County, yes, but LA proper, no. We live in a suburb of LA called Inglewood. We live right by a nursing home, a church, IHOP, Quizno's, McDonald's, and Vons, which is Californian for Safeway.

Last night we went to Vons to pick up some ingredients for chicken soup and a pumpkin. Edily rode in the cart. She is learning to wave. A woman said hi to her and waved and I saw Emily's little hand waving back, down at her side and not at all visible to the woman.
"Up high, kid. You gotta show off that fancy wave."
And then. And then, this guy rolled his cart real close and looked me straight in the eyes. He opened up a black binder which was perched on the baby seat of his cart and silently flipped the pages, one at a time. Was he trying to sell me a magazine subscription? I shook my head with the same apologetic-but-not-really face I use to say I'm all out of spare change (there hasn't really been any such thing since before the Child arrived) and pressed on through the meat department before I realized what he was selling. Those were miniature movie posters!
I hurried to catch up to Kenneth. "Hey, I just saw my first Inglewood bootlegger!"
"Oh yeah, they're in here all the time, or out in the parking lot." He was unimpressed, having grown up with such exotic things, but I still felt like something significant had happened.

When we came home I told Grammy and Grandpa about it. "This guy at the store tried to sell me bootleg DVDs!"
Grandpa said, "What titles did he have?"

Rats, I didn't see.

celebrity sightings are getting old.

gosh it's so BORING to see famous people all the time.

I wouldn't know, but I'm already totally unimpressed that today Kenneth saw Meg Ryan and Bob Saget in the same half hour. He even talked to Meg Ryan!

She said, "Is this the only bacon you have?"
and he said. "Yup. Although there is some Tempeh bacon over in the tofu case."
and she said, "um...Tempeh, huh."

and

making the world shake

videos!

We took a little trip to the pier at Redondo Beach.
This is from the car on the way home.

fun with colors

got this link from ZeFrank's blog.
Click the colors and see!

Banksy

Just found out about this artist.

Celebrity Sighting of the Day.

Kenneth called me from work again today. This time, he admitted his excitement. He almost asked her for Battlestar spoilers, but then again he didn't.

When in LA...

Kenneth doesn't like to make a big deal out of the high ratio of celebrity : the rest of us in this Godforsaken He- I mean, in this fertile valley of avocados and lip injections known as LA. I can see why, I mean, it's very touristy and not at all cool to act like you care when you see somebody from the movies buying their caramel frappaccino two places up ahead of you in line, or to get overly excited when famous writers wander into your bookclub (It's an honest mistake, and it happens all the time around here.) Plus, celebrities are people too, and people have a basic right to go grocery shopping without every person they meet staring or fumbling for some awkward comment about loving the work they've done. That said, I firmly believe in milking this LA opportunity for everything it's worth, and if all it's worth is a few celebrity sightings and year-round farmer's markets, well, I say bring it. Since Kenneth believes in pretending not to care when Flea buys pet food at his Whole Foods store, then I believe in pretending to care. Which I don't. Not really (which is sort of a lie - I am a shameless namedropper. Did you know I used to date a guy whose best friend's older brother played in the same space-rock band as Eddie Vedder's wife, Beth? We practically spent Christmas together, Pearl Jam and I). But I ask anyways, "Did you see any celebrities today?" as a sort of public service, so that Kenneth can be geeky about it without bothering any of the rich and famous who buy wild-caught Alaskan salmon at his store (Catherine O'Hara). I asked him this morning and Kenneth realized that he hadn't seen any in a while.


But then he called me from work, and guess who was shopping today, pushing his daughter in a cart around the store?
That's right. Little Nicky the Wedding Water Gilmore Guy.

"Was he being funny? Did you ask him to say something funny?!"
"Not really...he was just being a dad, which I respect."


ps. this morning I had a dream wherein I saw Kevin Nealon at a party and told him how much I loved his book. It took him a second to remember that he'd written a book, but he recovered quickly and thanked me for reading.

Escape, one month at a time.

Last month it was family in Seattle. Next month it'll be NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Starting November first, I'll be diving headlong into the sometimes luxurious, sometimes shark-infested waters of my own imagination, desperately fishing for the 1667 or so words that I'll need to type daily in order to meet the 50,000 word mark by the stroke of midnight, November 30th. What if I don't?

Well, most of my adult life thus far has been spent becoming adjusted to disappointment in myself, as I gracefully steer miles around any sort of finish line that I can see. I took the slacker approach to graduating high school, eventually earning my diploma through the local community college not by actually completing the American History course that I needed to cover the tenth of a credit my transcript was lacking, but by handing in one or two papers and then disappearing for the rest of the course. It was too sad for the academic counselor in charge of my case. She had already waived the P.E. requirements so that I wouldn't have to take archery. Months after dropping out of the Adult High School program, I received a diploma in the mail. Congratulations, it said. You slacked your way out of high school at last.

So then I tried some college. Then some jobs, then no jobs, then some more college, then less college and more jobs, and every combination possible. The latest attempt at reaching a goal found me throwing in the towel at the halfway mark, no longer so sure about majoring in Violin Performance while the residing professor deconstructed my bow arm and smirked at the Cello Professor when I skipped the entire Peanut Butter section of a Mozart Concerto during my audition. (As my childhood violin teacher explained song form to me, there is the bread and there is the peanut butter. The bread is the part at the beginning and the end, holding all the chewiness in the middle.) I barely made it into the music program, but then there was a snag in the residency status which I'd mistakenly thought two years in Oregon would have earned me. It would have, had I not attended school the whole time. I couldn't afford to pay out of state tuition for a degree I was no longer sure I wanted. So I got pregnant instead.

While growing a whole little person and ushering her safely (and with style!) into this world, then ensuring her continued survival by keeping her away from knives, broken glass, and Sarah Palin is its own kind of goal, which I meet with varying degrees of success each day, my daughter will never have the sheen of a finished product that I can hold up and say "Look! I wrote a book!" She is an ongoing process and while I can take some credit for her original adorableness and good sense of rhythm, she is her own creation now. But I can say that if I don't write this book, I might have to fill the creative void with another child, to remind me that I can achieve something. I can make something cool out of udon noodle soup and buffalo wings.

You might be asking yourself how you can stop me. How you can help me to reach my latest goal, one of the most unreachable and therefore most likely goals yet - 50,000 words in 30 days. What, does she want more money from me? In this crisis? The answer is a solid no, although I seldom actually refuse money. No, but there are some things you can do to ensure that Edie has a happy few years as an only child.

One, you can bug me about the novel. Ask me how it's going, how many words do I have. I may or may not decide to post excerpts of it here. It may be too embarrassing to share. The idea is not to produce a work of art, but to produce something. Anything. Typing fast is key. Not caring is also key. Telling all my friends and family about the Novel so I have more face to lose, should I decide to drop out and learn accordion instead, is perhaps the keystone.

Two, you can forgive another month of lite-blogging. If I blog, you'll know that I am procrastinating on the Novel, and then you can flog me with words. Flog and blog. Blog Floggers.

Three, I'll need music to write by. Tell me who I should listen to and I'll give it a try, really! I'll make a station on Pandora, but if you send me a mix of your favorite songs to write by, I guaran-frakkin'-tee I'll pop it in the stereo and give it a spin.

Four, and most importantly, you can JOIN ME! There is strength in numbers, even if only on a virtual space such as the internet. If we can't have an actual Noveling date at the cafe, we can at least commiserate online. Anyone can do this, you just have to sign up. And cancel many if not all of your engagements for November.

Fifthly, that's all I can think of for now. See you around!

We are back!

What a quick month that was!

We are back in LA and do you know what?

The sky was perfectly clear today. Blue with a smear of clouds and not a sign of smog anywhere. We drove to Playa del Rey and watched the sun set. It was so perfect, it looked like a t-shirt. It looked like a soft jazz compilation LP cover. It looked like the movies.

It looks like we're wintering south. And the Hoppers are getting a puppy.

Good things.

Spending time at Jill and Paul's farm, chasing chickens, pulling weeds, eating dirt, finding all kinds of spiders and crickets, attending the farmer's market, walking the bay trail, petting Patches Kitty, drinking a wee bit of wine, visiting with Corbin and Erin and Adam, playing peek a boo with Auntie Jill and Uncle Paul, and eating the most delicious meals. Thank you guys!

Walking the weekly trail with Mom and her friend Mary, avoiding the squirrels and crows which lurk behind every tree, and running into an old friend, Liz, who invited us over for a visit next week. Before she recognized me, she said that Edie was leaning around me to wave at her. "Do I know this baby? I love this baby!"

Attending Robby's homecoming festivities. We went to the assembly and saw hundreds of people dressed in Orange! Green! Purple! and Yellow! and screamed and jumped (okay, Edie did. I just held her.) When I went into the hall looking for a place to change her diaper, the football coach unlocked the training room so I could change her on a massage table. I called it the muscle room because of the decorating scheme, posters of various kinds of hue man anatomy. We later followed the homecoming parade around downtown Edmonds (my brother plays the quads in the pep band, it's his senior year at EWHS) until I got bored and found a baby reeeeeetail store. They had affordable halloween costumes, and I got one. It's a surprise, which one. It was between the one I got and a shiny Lobster costume. A few hours later we were invited to our new friend Clementine's toddler Halloween party, in LA. Serendipity! We shall not weep in our fancy costumes, alone but for a pile of tootsie rolls, on the Saturday before All Hallow's Eve.

PS. Edie can crow like a rooster now. She is growing a tooth and she loves to practice biting things with it. Mostly parts of my body. Today I accidentally bit her finger, so now we're even. She's had fingers accidentally bitten by both Daddy and Mommy now.

EdithEmily and I are in Seattle now.
She's asleep on Grandma Janet's chest, rocking.
Kenneth took us out for sushi the night before we left, two nights ago. Edie sat in the high chair while the elderly waitress hovered, making sure she didn't tip forward and bump her head on the edge of the glass table top. She brought a paper crane, a plastic dipping bowl. When Edie dropped one bowl, she brought another, and another. I offered Edie some pickled ginger, yuk.
We fed her mashed avocado from the avocado rolls.
We did not feed her wasabi, or sake, but enjoyed these things for ourselves.
Salmon, seared tuna, pickled radish, spider roll heaven.

I think I've become overly dependent on italics to put the stress in my writer voice. Is there a better way to emphasize a word? Is there a way to write it so that no emphasis is necessary? If it seems like I am being a bit overly scrutinitical, it's because I just got rejected by www.tutor.com. I do not meet the minimum requirements to be an online tutor. And that is after I lied about having an associate's degree. Sure, it's probably just that you need a PC and I'm using Kenneth's Macbook, but it brings up all these fresh feelings of loserliness. I'm not schooled enough, I'm not focused enough, not dedicated enough, not interested enough to get a job.

Today we met some more kids at the park. There were six of them, four girls and two boys. There was a white van parked on the street that they kept glancing at, so I assumed it was their parent or guardian. I asked the oldest girl, after she'd reprimanded one of the boys for asking me when Edie and I would be getting off the swing ("Tyler! Be nice!"), if they were all siblings. She laughed and said, um, Yeah, we're all family. Then she and another girl pretended to be sisters. You know sometimes white people can't tell black people apart. That's what she thought, maybe. I just can't tell people apart, period. Especially without my glasses, I can't even tell if people have faces or are composed of watercolored dots. So they pretended to be related while I slowly connected the watercolor dots: they were part of an afterschool program, they'd been driven here in the white van. Their caregiver was sitting in the van, talking on the phone. Tyler asked me to push his friend Kimmy on the swing, and I said no, because I had to watch my baby. He offered to watch my baby for me while I pushed. So he got off the swing and stood in front of Edie with his arms crossed, literally watching her sit in the sand, while I pushed Kimmy on the swing. Kimmy began to pump her legs like Tyler had shown her, so I went back to the baby. The two older girls came over, still pretending to be sisters. They talked to me about my baby. Tia was confused when I told her that Edie is 8 months old.
"I thought that babies had to be at least 9 months old."
I explained that first they grow inside the mother for 9 months, and when they are born the count starts over. So Edie's actually been a living creature for 17 months. The counting is funky from the start anyways, since weeks pregnant begins with the first day of last period. That's not when Edie started! I didn't try and explain the last part.
I did tell them about having her at home, in a tub full of warm water. The oldest girl said, "Really? That's tight!"
They asked why I didn't "get" to have my baby in a hospital, like normal moms. I told them it was my choice, because women have been having babies since before there were hospitals, so I figured I could do without the hospital. Later I thought about my other reason for having E at home. It's the same reason I got pregnant in the first place. There was a point when I just decided to be an animal. Not in the uncivilized sense of the word, but to quit resisting my instincts. It seems like we humans have gotten ourselves into quite a pickle because of our efforts to separate ourselves from the rest of the natural world. We are a pretty nifty species, with our language and reflective tendencies, but we are still made of animal. At least that's the way I see it. So if a cat can find a dark corner and suddenly...Kittens! and if a cow can drop a calf with minimal involvement from Farmer John, I reason that a woman doesn't have to be any different. She can curl up in a dark corner and calf an infant along with the rest of the natural world. It worked for me and the Wee One.

And if a lady can get paid to drive kids to the park where they supervise each other while she talks on the phone then I can just as well get myself a job hanging out with kids while they play and come up with interesting questions. As long as they don't require the use of a PC.

Holy Tomato

This morning we awoke with a shared vision. Just an old habit resurfacing.
"Let's go out to coffee."
Which was a pretty uneventful prospect, in St. John's. It was a matter of strapping on the baby, grabbing Travel Scrabble and a dictionary, and hiking up to either Anna Banana's or Ladybug Cafe, depending on how far we felt like walking and whether Jinx followed us or not (Anna Banana's wins the prize for Most Outdoor Pet Dishes, hands down). Sometimes, for a special treat, we'd get in the ... car ... and, um, drive... to the Little Red Bike Cafe. We actually rode our bikes there once, but I had this person living in my belly who got upset about knees banging on the wall. Kenneth refused to park the car anywhere near the cafe, being a diehard fan of biking and being also completely mortified to be seen driving there.

Here, the coffee outing is a completely different story. The only walking distance coffee is at the Starbucks inside of Vons, which just doesn't offer that relaxed coffee house atmosphere we crave. So we do the next best thing. Wait. The next best thing might be to stay home and brew up a pot of carbon-print free joe, but that also doesn't offer that relaxed coffee house atmosphere. Not relaxed in the slightest. :) So we Google and we Mapquest and we set off for the nearest hit returned after typing FairTrade ShadeGrown FreeRange HormoneFree WildCaught Etcetera.
The Conservatory for Coffee and Tea looked the most promising, its website decorated with the latte art we so took for granted in Stumptown.

I'd never been to Culver City before. Venice BLVD was closed. Some runners were having a marathon, apparently. So we jigsawed around this block and that block until, waiting at the light to cross Venice again, having mistakenly thought that we'd avoided the blockadence and would be able to turn left, Kenneth spotted a Wee Mouse as it ran under our car. Kenneth, being the guy that he is, showed some Concern for the fate of the creature. He revved and rocked the car a bit to scare the mouse out from under impending death while I squinted out the window to see if it ran. Kenneth spotted it again, this time hiding beside the wheel of a jeep behind us. Under the jeep. I stuck my head out the window and peered at the mouse several times. The Tough Guy in the Jeep stared at me. I didn't try and explain because he wouldn't have heard me. Kenneth rolled forward so that Jeep Guy might roll forward and scare off the mouse. Finally he did. The mouse tried to run in front of the back wheel and hopped back just in time not to be crushed. But then the light turned Green. Jeep Guy honked viciously at us, not knowing about the Wee Mouse or the Peril it was in, just that some lady kept staring at him out her window. We went, he went, and I don't know where the mouse went.

We passed SONY STUDIOS which is the size of a town. The Conservatory for Coffee and Tea was closed. We drove around some more and found Venice Grind and right next to it...

A FARMER'S MARKET!

Where there was a bucket of free gerbera daisies for the kids. It had a sign reading "Kids Pick One Free" and Kenneth helped Edie pick a pink one. She chewed on it until it ended up behind my ear instead. She kept a little green bit of it in her mouth for a long time though, which I found later. We sampled the wares. They were all delicious. We found the Heirloom Tomato guy, who was so nice he let us sample a melon from the next stand over. It was his personal melon, not for sale! He just wanted to share! Farmer's Market people are great people. We also saw the same guy selling dragonfruit that we'd seen at the El Segundo farmer's market. We split a dragonfruit from his stand for breakfast and now I believe in aliens. It's what would happen if you took the sourness out of a kiwi, replacing it with purple sorbet but keeping the seeds, and poured it into the perfectly hollow center of a spiky pink rubber football. Or something like that. There was a little girl exiting Heirloom Tomato Heaven with her mother, and she'd pulled a big yellow Pineapple tomato out of the bag and her mom had to stop her from eating it right there. In this land of processed kid foods that aren't really foods but brightly wrapped bits of science experiments aggressively marketed until some of our nation's young will only eat food from a box or can, and only if it's a certain kind of box or can, it is so refreshing to witness a kid trying to sneak a tomato before dinner.

I made bruschetta from my two little heirlooms...but next time I'm going to sneak one before we get home.

Lit Star Class

is starting.

Sing A Longing for St. John's...

oh man. my old neighborhood bookstore, St. John's Booksellers, just sent me an email advertising a SING-ALONG next Sunday. They are going to get together, brew some tea, and sing old folk songs out of a songbook. I don't even necessarily want to go, but the fact that it's there...in Portland. This is the same bookstore we went into to see Nena's chicks in a box, behind the counter. We had to ask to see them - special insider knowledge. Peeping babies for her backyard, as soon as they got old enough. Later she had ducklings. I love St. John's. It is such a special place. Portland is a special place, but St. John's is a really special place.





Here's how much I love it : the St. John's bridge is stuck to my leg, forever.

Monster Baby

I was in the middle of upgrading my baby doll with the scary wall-eye into a suitably weird gift for Maria's graduation when I got pregnant. I made Wall-Eyed Dolly a pair of butterfly wings out of two coat hangers, some yarn and a silk shirt, painted her head to match the wings, painted her arms and legs an alarming shade of Frankenstein Green, and sewed a forest scene scrap of fabric to her torso. While I was working on her, my friend Tara named her Monster Baby.

Now I have a Monster Baby of my very own, except that both of her eyes point in the same direction.Another thing I want you to know is that my Monster Baby is a quick study. After so many pictures were taken of her with the flash on, she began averting her eyes whenever I pointed the camera at her. Which, of course, was so darn cute I just took more pictures of her.

politicky-tacky

Kenneth's grandmother told his mother that she overheard somebody calling Sarah Palin, "Caribou Barbie". I wish I'd thought of it myself.

Palin is proud of her daughter's "choice" to keep the baby. Wait. What? So it was her choice? She chose to keep her baby? What was the other choice? Surely it wasn't the A word. Oh....Adoption. Yes, we are all proud of your choice, Bristol.

After watching some of the RNC last night, I've decided that if I were a major television network, I'd offer the Palin/McCain family their very own reality show. Seriously, despite their kooky politics, I just can't get enough of those adorable doe-eyed girls, and Cindy McCain bouncing the latest baby Palin while the world watches is family values to the tenth power. They can all live in a huge white mansion, and the show will be called "The Other White House." It will be more popular than the Osbournes, I predict.

All that comparison of Obama to celebrities like Britney and Paris, and now we have rumours of one Jamie Lynn Spears wishing Bristol Palin a happy, healthy pregnancy. The Palin family has become a media feeding frenzy. Even though I just can't look away from the mess, tonight I will, for just an hour, in order to see what Barack Obama has to say on the O'Reilly Factor. It is not to be missed.

I've been wanting chickens for some time now. In the Fairmount Hotel I'd fantasize about taking over the building - growing food on the roof, grazing goats and sheep in the courtyard, and letting chickens run rampant on the wrap around porch. In our St John's home we discussed the viability of building a coop in the yard, Kenneth drew up plans, but I was pregnant and we got suckered into taking a birthing class instead of dropping two hundred bones on lumber and chicken wire. I did learn to focus on my breath when the pain of a gasping uterus got out of hand, and how to navigate through hormone and anxiety fueled storms with a carefully scripted dialogue:

"I'm hungry, let's get some dinner."

"I hear you saying that you're getting hungry, and that you would like to get some dinner. I am also hungry, and feel that we should stop at that Pho place by Fred Meyer's and eat there."

"I hear that you want to some Pho, and I agree that Pho would be a good choice, but I feel like we should order it to go and take it home so that we can watch a movie."

"It sounds like you are saying that you would like to watch a movie and eat at the same time, but I am feeling like by the time we get our food home it will be cold and we may have already murdered one another in a state of temporary insanity caused by extremely low-blood sugar..."

and so on until we forgot to use the dialogue and reverted back to yelling and pounding walls. (the throwing of things and the pounding of walls I must shamefully admit, was all mine. Those hormones, huh?)

We never got those chickens. The best time to embark on a great chicken adventure, we were informed by those better informed than we, is the springtime, and our spring was all booked up by this newborn baby adventure we had scheduled the previous spring.

Now that we are living in LA, in a room that has become completely overrun by six-legged creatures of a particular succulence to the aforementioned type of fowl, I find myself wishing once again for a small flock of chickens to clean up this mess. Dreams of motherly little birds clucking with pleasure at the bounty of ants on our floor dance through my head. These ants. They walk on us at night, crawl up the sides of coffee cups, and hunt for stray cat kibbles on the bathroom floor.

Last night Kenneth woke with a start when Emily's hand grazed his cheek - he thought it was a mouse crawling over him.

I'm getting homesick. Homesickness is crawling over me as frequently as the tiny colonists. When I change Edie's diaper, there it is again! Thoughts of the Pacific Northwest march past me, on me, running here and there. I miss Washington, and the kooky Willamette River Valley town of Portland. There's one on the screen now.

All I can do is put food away and sweep the floor often. We'll see about the rest eventually.

wow a whole week

has elapsed and I think that is the longest since arriving here that the blog has been without update. For a while there a nice rhythm was settling into my bones...sleep in the mornings with Baby E while Kenneth gets up early to have his time...and after he and the baby go to sleep for the night, I'd sneak away to write in this blog. It was working so nicely, but then the daddy had to go and get himself hired at Whole Foods. In the meat department. Evenings. Same exact hours as before. I'm not complaining about his having a job. I'm not complaining about having whole stretches of day where Edie and I get to sit on blankets at the park or flirt with a busful of strangers on the way to the farmer's market across town. I'm complaining about that precious bit of night time that was mine, all mine, in which to write, read, knit, or read about knitting, or writing, while the rest of the house lay dormant.

Now, it seems there is no dormant time. None!
Kenneth comes home late and we hang out with a movie and leftover whatever was for dinner earlier (I always eat twice) as soon as Edie is asleep. Edie is getting to bed later and later now because she seems to be waiting up for Daddy to get home. By the time we go to sleep ourselves, Baby Early Bird is only a few hours away from getting the worm. She's fast now, too. When she's up, I'd better be too, or else bits of paper get consumed and diaper pails intimately explored. Her morning nap is my morning nap. Her afternoon nap is my lunch break. We'd better get outside at least once as well, or she and I both go a little nuts.

All I'm saying is that Kenneth and I should both be unemployed, so that we'd have time to write/knit/sew/play drums/cook delicious foods AND enjoy our precious infant child.

Right now it is piles of done and undone laundry mixing in ways that prevent their being cleaned, or hung.
It is a cascading trail of ants, an undulating puddle of ants, a carefully scripted and contagiously cheerful contingent of ants, holding their very own conference of delegates around the rubber soled shoes smelling ominously of meat. The promise of our future, they say, is that every ant will be gainfully employed, labor will not be outsourced, the crumbs in our house will be carried out by the ants under our house.
The cats are understandably upset as their litter pan has been exported to a little spot outside, by where the dog lays at night. I'm too tired to think of a practical solution. Just go somewhere. Anywhere. Jinx is gone gone gone. For some reason I haven't been dwelling on it. It is what it is. If I think too hard, I'll get sad, and there is no room for being sad about Jinx in a situation like this. Right Left Right Left. You just gotta keep walking.

But just for a second?

Jinx is the most amazing cat I've ever known. People who are devoutly Un-cat people have admitted, a little bashfully, that there is just something about that cat. Junior at the Fairmount called him Cat Dog. Every neighbor I talked to would tell me stories about Jinx. "Your son came to visit me this morning. He just walked straight past me, through the door, and into the bathroom where he drank from my toilet." Or how Tim walked up the front steps, opened the front door, and saw Jinx galloping toward him from the end of the block. Tim held the door waiting, and when Jinx got to him he stopped running, looked up as if to say thank you, and walked nonchalantly up the stairs and turned right, heading for my apartment.
Once, when he'd been missing for a whole day and I was starting to worry, I went out to look for him and ran into the former live-in building manager who'd been fired the week before and wasn't taking it very well. He was staggering down the street with a big grin, a six-pack in one hand and a paper sack in the other. "Hey I got me a new cat, man, he's the sweetest thing! He's been cuddling with me all day and now I got a sack full of cat food." I asked if it was Jinx and it was. He took the disappointment well. "No problem, man, we're gonna watch American Idol together and I'm gonna feed him some dinner. Then I'll send him up to you." I told him that that would be fine as long as Jinx was home before midnight. Jinx would spend all day visiting the neighbors, eating their fried chicken and sleeping on their couches, but he always made it back to my door around midnight. We slept like spoons in a drawer, every night. He was my cat boyfriend. When my other boyfriend started coming around, Jinx moved to the foot of the bed, and then the chair by the window, without much complaint. When we moved in with that other boyfriend and his football jock cat, Siddartha, Jinx was miffed but he still did not complain. He transferred headquarters to the attic, where he could sleep undisturbed and still be the Alpha catdog. Sid and then the kitten, Gertrude, took over the house with their busy wrestling, and Jinx took over the neighborhood.

Oh man that is simply quite enough.

That cat is special and I hope he has found a situation that makes him happy. I don't blame him for taking off - we are crowded into somebody else's home with a dog that was here first and a cat that was here first. The one spot behind the dresser in the closet that Jinx had found for privacy got taken away when we moved some furniture. Leaving was the sensible thing to do.

I guess.

We miss him though.

Things we made.

It starts out simply enough. A spur-of-the moment trip to Joann fabrics to pick up some more of that cotton yarn that lends itself so nicely to the market bag pattern I've been testing out, becomes a sudden fabric epiphany. How we got all the way across the store to the fabric swatches from Yarn Town is out of my hands. Edie was driving the cart, chubby legs all a-dangling, when we screeched to a halt before a bolt of gold, cranberry, and forest green butterflies competing for air space. One of those now-rare moments of same wavelength surfing, and not a word was exchanged before the project agreed upon.
"I'll make her a dress!"
"You should make her a dress."

Well, if Kenneth was going to make her a dress, then I would too. Never mind the thirty-odd knitting projects I've started, here was a remnant of orange, and another of zebra. While we were at it, the baby's baby has been naked for too long, since I stripped her of the flame retardant pink and purple pantsuit she came with. So, she needed a matching dress.
And while this pattern, copied from a handmade dress purchased at Lily Toad, was so incredibly easy to make and easy to put on (nothing over the head and no finger-snagging sleevery), there was that old sheet that I rescued from the donation pile in the garage. Mama Hops came home to the whole operation and said, "Um, is that my sheet?"

Not any more, Grammy.By the way...there are no photos of the dress Kenneth made yet, which has nothing to do with the fact that it's the cutest one.

LA, this behavior's gotta stop.

Oh Los Angeles, I think you are winning.
Wearing me down to a nubbin with your evil ways, your hot sunshiney desert ways.
Your hoses bleeding good clean water into green grass lawns that never meant to grow here, bleeding water into wasted puddles in the street.
Your plastic bags, your long commutes, your angry, angry drivers.
Those infinite spots of tar on every sidewalk where aborted bits of chewing gum were flung to rest and became oily black stains in the heat.
The woman who came too close with her cigarette and touched my baby's arm, asked for change, and kept her hand on Edie when I said I had none and said "Just two quarters? Emily, your mama doesn't want to help me..." (but then I grew a voice I didn't know I had and told her she needed to Let Go. Now. The situation didn't make me nervous so much as realize that I have a grizzly bear hibernating in me. Don't touch my cub with those soiled intentions.)
LA I am tired of that nicotine stained sky you call blue every day, punctuated only by the 24-hour parade of airplanes coming in to land, so close we can reach out and draw our own logos on their smooth sides. That seaweed flavored fruit roll-up spread thickly over our heads, nibbled by the jagged teeth of those raggedy palms meant to suggest some kind of paradise. That poor battered sky getting bruised by those great black oil wells, pumping their blind fists in the air without listening to reason.
LA why do you have to clutter up every moment of space with your WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS everywhere? Each place of business competes with each other in volume of printed material scraping my eyeballs as we drive by. It's not just Randy's Donuts. It's Try Randy's Bacon Double Cheeseburger. It's Drive Thru around Back. It's Gatorade and Pepsi Cola and Fried Chicken and everything on the menu has its own separate sign. As if nobody wants to talk to each other. Now I completely empathize with any citizen of this town who does not enjoy reading for pleasure. The visual assault of word upon word upon meaningless money-grubbing word makes me want to banish printed material from the house and watch something on tv that requires no reading. Better yet, hire a mime.

So I've undertaken many knitting projects. So many that nearly all of my needles are busy dreaming up futures free of entanglement. My hands need this variety of texture so they knit a row of each at a time. They stroke the rabbity tail of baby alpaca for a minute, then scrub with a no-nonsense string of American cotton, rough to the touch, before switching to the mysterious forest of wool in shades of Pine, Fir, Cedar, and Birch, all blending together soundlessly. Wordlessly, which is strangely enough just what I need right now.

Let Grammy teach the baby to say Apple. I am teaching her to sit contentedly in silence with nameless colors and feelings. Just kidding. She is a noisy little sprout of song, wildly tapping her egg shaker against the new tambourine, trying to clap and bowing her head irreverently with her hands clasped, not clapped. Grunting with the effort. Pulling book after book out of the basket by the bed, not to read, but to wave in the air and pass from one hand to the other while alternately chewing or studying the covers. How far will they go if scooted? How about thrown? Dropped? What sound will the egg shaker make if tapped on a piece of tupperware? The floor? A belly? Emily is busy. Yes Emily. Yes Edie too. Embrace the confusion, as we have.

"This happens. This really happens."

According to Gertrude, our third and weirdest cat, there are frogs in L.A.

I know!

I didn't believe her either, but then she coughed up the proof.
Half of which is currently lying beside the other half of which, in a smear of grass on the bathroom rug.
It is too tired and I am too late to clean it up tonight.

By the way...If you can guess what movie the subject of this post is from, I'll send you a very special postcard. If it's too hard, I gave you a hint.

Good night, sleep tight, I hope we all feel better in the morning. Gertrude already does.

Edit: Turns out they were simply crickets. Three in a row, posing as a frog. It's not like I looked super closely at them...

Highlights.

Today a man with rollerskate blue highlights in his hair and a cowboy hat on his head asked Kenneth if there would be women walking the streets, later. This is a family blog and so that's all I will say. But he punctuated his question with fun little details about why he was asking.

Today Edie was given her first balloon, at the grocery store. It was a red balloon. She yanked on it like an upside down yo-yo, all the way to KC's Crepes cafe where we occasionally get our bubble tea on. In the cafe, staring at the balloon finally got her to notice the mirrored ceiling, which I've been trying to show her for a month. We both tipped our heads all the way back to make faces in the mirror, until she almost fell out of the sling.

Edie hit her head twice in one hour, first backward then forward. She's toughening up.
Did I mention she pulls herself up on things now?
Did I mention she likes to dance?
Did I mention she is trying to talk?

Blog under Construction

Things are getting a bit ugly around here. Please forgive the mess as I stumble through basic page design issues. It's a step at a time, so until then....chaos!

Lost cat busybody society

Did you know there are people who browse the lost pet ads on Craigslist.com, not because they have found a lost animal and want to return it, but because they have a message to share, and don't you know the people who need to hear it the most are those who have just lost a beloved pet?

I placed a second ad on craigslist for Jinx. Maybe I shouldn't have admitted it was the second time he's run away, but I just wanted to head off those (above-mentioned) who might be keeping track. Maybe I shouldn't have made a feeble joke about the reason for Jinx's disappearance being the eternal, infernal, sunny weather. Maybe I shouldn't have posted the ad last night in a fit of guilt after reading the chapter in The Amber Spyglass wherein Lyra is separated from her beloved Pan for the first time in her life, and I realized I hadn't taken any measures to increase the chances of Jinx's safe return home. I wasn't really thinking straight. I meant to type "neutered male" but instead I wrote "intact." I was probably thinking that I hope Jinx is intact, wherever he is. Not that his Special Purpose is intact, because it's not.

This morning when I checked my email there were two responses to the ad. Hallelujah! Have they seen Jinx? Have they adopted him and renamed him Fluffy, and their children will be very sad to lose their new sticky lollipop holder but they'll manage, maybe they'll get a kitten after seeing how well Jinx fit into the family?

NO.
One email contained the "kind advice" that if I really love and cherish my cat, I should keep him indoors only. It's the responsible thing to do. Oh, and this woman's vet says that cats that aren't fixed are more likely to be hit by cars because all that mating ritual stuff is distracting.

I responded thanking her for the friendly advice but admitting that I had really hoped for some actual information about my actual cat, not vague advice about the right way to have a cat. Jinx is simply not an indoor cat. To keep him indoors would be like trying to force Edie to become a dental hygienist when her dream is to be a cowgirl. I know, because I did try. It just wasn't possible. Glasses broke, blinds were ruined, and he outmeowed my determination. That is why I love him so much, he's not nobody's cat but his OWN. He does what he wants. (I'm just a little perturbed that he wanted to run away again)

Next email told me that it was my own fault he ran away, for not getting him fixed. The author hoped that I would learn a lesson from this, and called me stupid for thinking it was the weather that drove Jinx to a life of vagrancy. I responded appropriately, and then fixed the ad.

Lost neutered male....please respond ONLY if you have actually seen Jinx, or know where he might be found.

I remember when Jinx was fixed. He sat on my lap, stone still, purr silenced, for hours and hours. I canceled my plans for that night so I could sit with him by the window while he recovered from the drugs, and the snip. They all say it's the best thing but it will never feel quite right to me, to interfere with another creatures ability to reproduce. I'll bet there are a number of animal creatures who'd like to spay and neuter the humans, if they could. I did it, though, I did the "responsible" thing and fixed Jinx so he wouldn't be a frustrated kitty. I kept him inside, too, until he showed me that he could handle himself outside without the leash that he wore as a kitten chasing leaves and climbing trees.

My Birthday in the Hood.

Psssssst.

Hey. Hey you.
Thank you for generously donating to the Send Kendal to Online Literary Star School fund.
I made roll call!
I waved some kizzash in the aiyer (like I simply did not care, though I did) and Ms. Gore did declayer, "you're in."
Sah-weeet!

And now...remedial English skillz, yo, LA has gotten all stuck in my grillz
like a superfly stuck under the hood.

I am so sorry. It is Two in the Morning.
The baby is asleep.
The babydaddy is asleep.
The babydaddy's mama and daddy are asleep.
The cats (minus my favorite one) are even not peeing on towels, not biting or licking the baby or my feet, and not singing the blues by the door, they are, indeed, asleep.


This is MY time.
Me, Myself, and Sleep Deprived I time.

I had a wonderful birthday.
Kenneth made a chocolate cake with mixed berry filling and blackberries placed like soccer players on a snowy field of frosting.
We ate spaghetti for dinner.
We had bubble tea and witnessed an LA moment, wherein one tall, lean, tan, rushity rush rush lady parked, rolled windows down, got out, went in, came back, checked locks, looked around, went back in, Edie fussed, the lady came back, looked in car windows, and explained, "Oh, I heard a baby crying, and I thought it was mine!" before returning to the doorway of the shop to stand in line. We shared aforementioned LA moment with another couple of customers sitting at a table across from us in the parking lot sunbrella alcove. "Did she just say..." Sure 'nuf, an infant seat reclined away from us in the backseat of her car. I thought it might be fun to pretend to kidnap the baby, just to teach her a lesson, but then I had my hands full with my very own baby already.
We went swimming at the YMCA, where they let us swim for free because Edith Emily is just the cutest little thing! She is also the most enthusiastic swimmer I've ever seen, but then again, it's in her genes. It's in all our genes, get it? Because you gotta be a good swimmer just to get here? Really, we weren't going to have her in the pool, we were going to take turns holding her and playing in the water, but she was so into it. It's basically a GIGANTIC bathtub full of salty tasting (?) water and people. Water and people are Edie's two favorite things besides breasts and plastic bags. So we dipped her in a few times and she howled with glee, and splashed, and waved, and charmed everybody out of the pool. Actually the session was over.
On the way home we were so jazzed about life that we risked ours to satisfy a sudden craving for soft serve ice cream. The only place to get the fix was at Foster's Freeze.....in the ghetto.
"Oh boy let's go there!"
So we did. Quickly, and with locked car doors. They had no drive thru window, so we held the baby close and ran, hunched over to avoid possible crossfire from gang warfare, and made it to the front counter. The signs advertising various sundry delights were overwhelming in their sun-faded commotion of flavors. Peach Parfait! Banana Twirl! Whipped cream cup! We both opted for simplicity, for safety's sake. One small chocolate shake and one medium chocolate-dipped twist cone that immediately commenced avalanching before I could savor it properly. "Cup, please," and a styrofoam cup and plastic spoon were shoved promptly through the small window, the only window not protected by iron bars. We hustled back to the car and the doors were powerlocked before I could shut mine behind me.

"That girl who made your shake."
"Yeah?"
"You think she was a Blood or a Crip?"
"Just eat your ice cream."

By the way.
It was a great birthday.
Thank you for contributing to my writerly aspirations by reading this here blog.