reunion

Only have a minute....

but I felt compelled to let you know how much I love this FMP renewal time of year...

Normally, I'm not terribly aware of exactly who our subscribers are. But at renewal time, as your renewals come to me, I am reminded of all the great people who read the magazine each month, and whom I've come to know through the years - either online or at workshops. I smile when I see many of the names on the renewal notifications, remembering folks fondly. And some of you include little comments on your PayPal form, which are fun to read...

I am happy I know so many cool colored pencil folks. I am happy you keep liking FMP enough to keep renewing!

my wish for you...

nice things

I've been reading that you can become happier with different exercises. Like how you can become healthier by eating right and exercising. Or like how you can become more flexible by stretching, or...well, you get the point.

One of the happier exercises is to think about a number of nice things right before you go to sleep every single night. It's like the gratitude journal idea, only for the lazy. My sister told me she read about one woman who thinks of 20 good things about that day every night.

I'm headed off to bed right now...so I thought maybe I'd try the happy exercise tonight, but do it in my blog. Here goes...

• I got 5 or 6 hugs at dance tonight. All the instructors are so cool....it's a very huggy group.

• My son got a very dirty diaper tonight at McDonald's, where we always go eat when I take him out for a visit (That isn't the nice thing!) I didn't have another diaper to put on him after peeling (sorry!) off the dirty one, and without a diaper, his jeans are dangerously loose. Dangerously. The nice thing is that we managed to walk out of the McDonald's bathroom and all the way to the car without his jeans suddenly dropping to the ground!!!

• I got lab work results back today and my cholesterol level is 160 and my LDL is 112. Damn. I love passing tests I don't have to study for.

• 6 Christmas cards in the mail today! Very nice. Well, actually - a mixed blessing. I don't send Christmas cards so each one I get gives me both a warm fuzzy feeling and a stab of good old fashioned German Lutheran guilt....

• Tuna roll sushi for lunch today!

• Caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror at the studio while dancing the Swing tonight, and I think maybe I might kind of almost look like I'm starting to know what I'm doing on the dance floor???!!!

• My favorite nice thing about today? It will be another whole year before we have a day as short or a night as long as today's....

I think I feel happier already! G'night!

wind, rain and clam chowder

Thursday afternoon, someone unzipped Seattle's skies, and out fell seas of water.

Although Seattle is known for rain, it doesn't really rain here. What it does do is sprinkle, drizzle, mist and shower. Most of us don't even own umbrellas. So when this drenching started, Audrey (my assistant) and I leapt from our chairs to watch the violent waterfalls already cascading from the roof. It was shocking.

A few hours later, I sat on my sofa in the dark, surrounded by candles and afghans, trying not to lose a little bit of my mind. For 6 hours the wind howled and bullied and occasionally screamed, sending thuds to my roof and siding and windows and I just wanted it to be over! I do not know how anyone stays sane through a hurricane, I really don't. I was, in a word, terrified.

Around 3:30 in the morning, the monster outside my window calmed down enough that I finally had the courage to make the trek down my hall (a bee-line toward 6 of the largest fir trees in my yard) climb into bed and fitfully sleep.

Daylight brought relief...since I saw that other than no power, there was no damage. Certainly nothing like these poor souls had...

My yard was a mess of branches and shingles (not from my roof!) but that was it. I cleared off the bigger branches and made some phone calls. No one I knew had power in the entire greater Seattle area except my son's group home! Sensing it would be days before power would be restored, and being a woman too old and too smart to think that suffering does anything except make you suffer, I packed a tote and high-tailed it into the business center of town where some of the lights were back on. The Comfort Inn had power! And they had rooms!

I checked in, chatted with other cold souls in the lobby about where to get hot coffee and hot food, settled into my 2-queen bed room, then headed out again in search of something steaming and soothing, which I found at Coco's. They'd just had their power restored and opened a few minutes before I pulled up. Hot coffee and hot clam chowder and toasted garlic bread made absolutely everything all right again.

All told, over a million homes and businesses lost power in greater Seattle. I spent 3 nights at my hotel-home away from home, (my daughter and boyfriend joined me Saturday night, since they still have no power!) but now I am back home and I have power and heat and the internet and a TV and a microwave and an oven and a garage door opener and a printer and a DVD player and Christmas lights and normal is normal again. I didn't lose a thing in the fridge or freezer, since the house temp dropped into the 30's. I got to spend a couple of days with my daughter and we had fun playing cards using cough drops as poker chips, eating through a box of chocolates we treated ourselves to (she likes milk, I like dark) and just hanging out.

I am glad it is over. I did learn one thing, though. I've decided it's time to grow up some and make myself, for the first time, an emergency backpack to keep in the hall closet. Water, flashlight, bandaids, candy bars, nuts, batteries and phone numbers. I realized that without the internet, I am completely cut off. I don't keep a phone book around, and I had to call my sister in Eugene to have her look up the Comfort Inn phone number. And without my cell phone, I know no phone numbers...not even my daughter's!!! It's pretty stupid to let a little device like a cell phone be your brain...

So far, we've had the worst winter we've had in forever....and it's not even winter yet!

it's ok

Have about a minute and a half to spare right now....

But I just have to thank you all for the heart-felt comments.

And also to let you know that, once I saw how ridiculous it was to save minutes, I instantly stopped that foolishness!

Marylou (my sis) and I had a juicy 2-hour talk yesterday and another half hour today, and I've upped my minutes in Verizon so there'll be no more of that minute-saving nonsense! :-)

She'll be my roommate on the Mexican Riviera Workshop Cruise in February, and with any luck, will also be on the Alaskan Cruise Workshop with me in May. We mostly laugh a lot when we're together. She's just the best...

saving my minutes...

My baby sister, you may know, has late stage ovarian cancer. That is a bad cancer to have...

She is my only sister and we're close. She lives 4 hours south of me in Eugene. We email a lot, but don't talk all that often because I'm on Verizon and she's on something else so it costs us minutes to talk unless we wait till after 9:00, but by then she's often tired. And weekends are hectic for both of us.

Today, I wanted to talk to her, so I made a mental note to try to remember to call her right at 9:00.

Then I got up from my computer and was walking down the hall to my bedroom thinking about finding my slippers when it struck me. I am not calling my only sister during the day, my kid sister that I will lose within the next half dozen years...because I am saving my minutes.

My minutes.

We go through life in half a daze of habit and unexamined behavior most of the time, don't we?

In a few years, how many minutes would I be willing to "un-save" to talk to my sister?

recurring dream...

Lately I have been experiencing a recurring dream....

I am backstage in a large auditorium. A signal is given, and I walk into the middle of the stage. The lights are white hot and blinding, so I can't see the audience at all. There are clues there may be at least a few people out there - a muffled cough, someone clearing their throat...

I sing a long, soulful ballad, then without pause, immediately launch into a short little whimsical ditty. Then, silence.

I walk off stage. I don't know if one person heard me or a thousand. I enjoyed singing the songs, though....and the idea that there may have been an audience was a little thrilling...

OK. It's not really my recurring dream. It's just sorta what it feels like to blog! If you are reading this, and ever want to clap, or hop on stage and sing with me, or throw tomatoes, please feel free to click "comments" found below every post.

surreal spam

I checked my email just now. Do you have any idea how utterly weird and surreal it is to get SPAM that includes an image you yourself drew?????!!!!

Here's a screen capture of my Outlook Express...with the spam mentioned. Let me tell you....it is a feeling that is way surreal...sorta like if I sent myself spam, then forgot that I sent it....

Seems like a great price on that 132-set, though! :-)

teeth...who knew?

Did you know that if you go to 7 different dentists, and they all take x-rays of all your teeth, you can walk away with 7 entirely different plans of attack on those teeth?

The older I get, the more I realize I live in la-la land...

See, up until yesterday, I still thought that what's wrong with your teeth isn't really open to interpretation. I thought if you have a cavity, you have a cavity and your kindly dentist fills it and then that's that. Or maybe you need a root canal and your kindly dentist does the root canal and then that's that!

My dentist retired about 6 years ago...and I'm on my 7th dentist since then!!!

Dentist #1: Wore plastic flip flops, had a bright blond streak in the front of his long black hair, and when I told him one tooth was giving me some serious pain, he gave me a prescription for a mouth wash. I...uh....didn't go back.

Dentist #2: Talked and joked incessently, mostly about the videos he was willing to play in the TVs he had in each exam room. Told me I needed 3 root canals and a mouth guard. We started with one root canal. When the cap didn't fit the first time, he sent it back. When it didn't fit the second time, he sent it back, when it didn't fit the third time he got mad at me and said I wasn't closing my mouth correctly. Huh??!! When it didn't fit the fourth time I lied and said it all felt great and since I'd paid him before we even started the work (should that have been a clue?) I lost in every way.

Dentist #3: Smiled a lot and talk incessently about how much prettier my smile would be with 8 veneers. Every time I smiled, he'd shake his head and say "Oh...just let us make your smile prettier..." How creeeepy is that? In the end, he showed me on his super high tech monitor how the last dentist had missed a canal because.....LUCKY ME! I have an extra canal in that tooth! He shooed me off to his friend the endodontist. Endo-what???

Dentist #4: Yes. Entirely possible that I need my cap removed and another root canal done on that tooth, agrees the endo hot-shot. However, since I don't have dental insurance (the down-side to being self-employed ... Up-side? robes & slippers qualify as "work clothes") he suggests I find a cheaper endo-dude, as his fees are the highest in the state.

Where did I go wrong? What is happening? How can it be so hard? What dark, dental horror film have I accidentally fallen into??

Dentist #5: Gorgeous tropical fish in the Rhode Island sized aquarium in the waiting room....cool bells and whistles in the exam room....soft-spoken, pleasant mannered dentist...my third set of full x-rays in 3 years...Diagnosis: I'll need 4 root canals first. then I can come back to do the $5000 worth of work he'd also like to do in my mouth. He'd love for me to see his favorite endodontist - can't say enough about how highly he can recommend him....

sigh.

Dentist #6: oh my. We are talking one seriously nice waiting room - espresso coffee - a jungle of tropical plants - leather chairs. What am I doing here??? This lovely man said he would need to re-do the botched root canal, and would also need to do an additional 4 root canals. We're now at a grand total of 5 root canals!!!!!!!! The total cost for both this guy and the aquarium guy would be.....drum roll please......$14,000.

I went home and looked longingly at the pliers...

Then I turned 50. AARP, baby! So now, with AARP dental insurance card firmly gripped in my hand, I visited:

Dentist #7: Dr. Brossel was recommended to me by a friend I've made at dance. Dr. Brossel is my hero. He is the dentist I've dreamed of while passing up the salad coz it's too crunchy for my poor teeth (the Almond Roca, too..and that's sinful). My 5th set of xrays later, he tells me I need one root canal. One. I need a little gum work. I need a tooth re-shaped. I need 2 fillings, and I need a tooth filed down.

And if I'm feeling particularly vain and frivilous, we could do one veneer on the one "fang" I despise because it is just so very fangy.

I am more grateful than I know how to express, to have finally found a no-nonsense, honest dentist. I would clean this man's toilets for a year, I swear. Or clean out his gutters, at least....

Who knew 7 dentists could read basically the same mouth 7 different ways? Who knew?

Kelly again...

I'll pick up where I left off in my last post...

After Kelly picked up the Kitchenaide, he went home and emailed me. It was an extraordinary message - letting me know that he had an inoperable cancer, that he was finding a new and deeper life in his death sentence...and ended with this:

Thank you for the Kitchenaid, the baking supplies and a moment to touch each other's souls.

I replied to Kelly, telling him about my sister's ovarian cancer...and thus began a 3 month email journey. Our emails were full, surprising jewels of human-ness.....He wrote to me of the awful abuse he'd suffered as a child in rural eastern Washington, growing up in a home without running water....but always with a spirit of victory rather than martyrdom. I told him of my recent heartbreak and my fears about my sister. He answered with heartbreak stories of his own....and kind words of support, encouragement and love. He promised to find resources to help my sister in Euguene...We discovered we both are fiends for Boggle and Scrabble, and that Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday.

When you meet a man who has a year or so to live, you would kinda expect that you'll be the "supporter", the "giver", the "nurturer", right?? What a surprise to find that Kelly's glowing, calm spirit has given more to me than I can imagine I have given to him.

After 3 months of email communication, I decided to help Kelly pass away the hours at a chemo treatment last week. Once again I received a surprise from Kelly! I walked into his tiny chemo cubicle to find a virtual Chemo Party going on! The room was full of friends...all of whom emanated the same shining goodness I've come to expect from my unlikely friend...

It was great fun. Conversation somersaulted from seat belt laws to politics to baking to music to movies...Afterwards, a few of us went to Starbucks for coffee and more talk and laughs, and by the time I left, I felt I had forever known Kelly. When I got up to go, he gave me a long, long bear hug and said "I just didn't expect to fall so completely in love with you!"

I got rid of a heavy duty mixer in August...and got a heavy duty friend from it by December.

Life is.....truly.....amazing........