Category: All (-ish)

Pike Schemes found some good postcards.

I sent postcards when I was in Boise, but Pike Schemes found theirs in a different location than I did.  Two arrived today.

Get it?

(Um, in retrospect, you might not get it if you are not familiar with the touchy nature the natives of Idaho’s capital city feel about the pronunciation of their city name.   But for those of us in the know, it’s funny.)

Signs!

I love that the Boise Rescue Mission has a neon sign.  It’s one of the things I never found odd while living there, but seems strange now.

45RPM: Wagon Wheel

Where I match a song to a specific memory.

I first heard this song at a friend’s singing party and experienced that weird feeling I get when everyone is singing along to an awesome song I’ve not heard before.  It was forgotten in the crush of songs that night but found again in a tiny Hawaiian restaurant in a mountain town in Colorado.

We had traveled to the cool breezes of the summer mountains to see my boyfriend’s brother get married.  It was a fun wedding on a ranch where we rode horses and every morning ate a good breakfast.  Our last night there we drove into town to see (follow this chain if you can) my boyfriend’s mother’s partner’s son Jon play a set at local restaurant.  I’d met the player in question at a different family wedding and found him full of good humor and easy conversation.  That he also lived in Colorado and played the guitar was a revelation for this trip.  It was sunset when we arrived and as the light faded we sang along as Jon played many songs I know.  His set lasted longer than we did and as we packed up to leave he launched into this song.  We walked to our car, we could still hear his singing drifting across a creek that ran through town.  I sang along with the chorus, “Rock me mama like a wagon wheel,” but the next line was interrupted when John spotted us across the way, “Rock me mama–goodbye Dad!” he called mid-line.  We laughed as we found our car and sped off into the night.

Take your poet to work day.

It’s Take Your Poet to Work Day!

I brought my favorite poet, Marge Piercy.  Of course, one of her cats had to come along too.
 

To alert everyone to this most important day, I made a quick display in the window.  On the right is the announcement from tweetspeak about TYPTWD and a cutout of Emily Dickinson, one of the featured poets they suggested.  On the right is Marge Piercy and two of her poems. (They happen to be this one and this one, both of which I have committed to memory.)

I never saw anyone look at my display all day long.  Alas.

(prompt) ends. Broadsheet Published.

For the past 10 weeks I’ve been taking a writing class called (prompt) given by Write Around Portland.  It’s been a fabulous experience and this night was no different.  Tonight we got our broadsheets, which feature work by everyone in the class.

I was quite happy with my (prompt) experience and in the future I will publish a few of the pieces I wrote during the class on the blog.  In the meantime, thanks to Write Around Portland, my fellow class participants and especially Matt Blair, our instructor.

Onto the next project: Colette Patterns’ Laurel Uniform Shirts!


I’ve mentioned the plan before and now that the Waste Not Napkins are done, I can officially launch into the Uniform project.  Material has been bought, enough for three shirts, two dresses and two different aprons.  Fitting DVDs have been watched.  So I’m off now, tracing the pattern, ready for another sewing adventure.

Waste not napkins


One of the things about sewing that drives me crazy is all the leftover material.  In the past I have saved every bit and piece, but not ever done a thing with them.  So now I try to squeeze as much out of the leftover material, but the question often is “what to make?”  I was lucky with the Crepe dress, to have goodly bits of material big enough for square napkins, so here I am cutting away, while watching a video on fitting.

45RPM: “Dreams to Remember” “Breathe,”

Where I match the song to a specific memory

In a corner of my living room are two objects that hold what remain of my once-extensive cassette tape collection.  The sliding drawer fake-wood holders contain several cassingles (the inferior replacement for the 45RPM record) and the many mix tapes I can’t bear to part with. Most of the tapes I made myself, culling songs from friends collections, dubbing them from my own tapes and even, when desperate, recording them off of the radio.  A few are from friends who also specialized in the magic of mix tapes.  Two of them are from boyfriend #4.  He was the only one of my boyfriends who ever made me mix tapes* and they were good, mostly because his taste in music was more sophisticated than my own.  There’s a bit too much Frank Zappa, it’s true, but there are some real gems on those tapes, two of which are above and still hit me just the way they did when I first hear them:  straight in the gut, weakening the knees.

Boyfriend #4 was a summer thing between freshman and sophomore years of college.  He didn’t want to do the long-distance thing, so we broke up when I went back to school and he moved on to a woman named after a mountain in California, or–as I preferred to think of it–a brand of soda.  That was rough on me, and I pined a bit, listening to the songs he had given me on a fairly regular basis.  It occurs to me now that these two songs are perfect breakup songs, and I delight in how the object of my affection supplied me with the musical sustenance to get over him, right from the beginning of our relationship.

*Current boyfriend made me a mix CD at the beginning of our relationship, but in my mind, the mix CD is a completely different beast.