We’re Tilting to Starboard, Cap’n!

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Location Taken: Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario
Time Taken: June 2010

You ever have one of those days where everything seems tilted?

I had one of those when I visited Sault Ste. Marie (pronounced “Soo Saint Marie”, by the way). We went for a walk along the waterway between Lake Superior and Lake Huron (and between the US and Canada). Lovely sunlight, just enough wind to get small waves in the water, wonderful conditions all around for photography. And most of them came out with the horizon line on one side of the photo noticeably lower than the horizon line on the other side. Mostly tilting to the right, like this one.

This one’s the most egregious, really. I was very carefully lowering my camera on the other side of the railing to get a shot along the shoreline and was much more interested in making sure I didn’t drop it on the rocks and water below than I was about lining the shot up perfectly. It’s not too surprising it tilted.

There are also days where you’re metaphorically tilted as well. The stress and irritants and… stuff… pile up and you feel like you’re just going to keel over at any moment. I usually even make it a little less than metaphorical, since I seem to automatically lean off-center more and more as the stress gets overwhelming.

I had one of those days just a few ago. Thirty hours of driving in four days, averaging four hours of sleep a night just because your body refused to fall asleep and getting more and more off-feeling because you keep having to eat at places that aren’t, shall we say, nutritionally diverse enough for proper body management. I was about ready to fall over at the end of it. Actually, I did fall over, just tipped over on the couch I was sitting on and saw the world from a more horizontal perspective. At least all it took was a decent meal and 12 hours of sleep to get me much more functional again. I’ve had world-tilting times where it took a lot more than that.

This photo, though, shall stay tilted. Well, unless I futz with it in Photoshop some, but you know, I just don’t feel like it. It’s good to acknowledge the tilted times too.

  

Shall we place the presents under the tree, my dear? Huh, no room left.

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: December 2010

It’s a very rare thing for us to stay home for Christmas.

Christmas to New Years is one of our standard traveling times. We’ve got a lot of relatives to visit, and they’re clustered in Michigan. It’s rather easy for us to go and visit all of them in one big trip, certainly easier than it is for all of them to come visit us. This does mean decorating our house for Christmas is rather low on the priorities, since we won’t be there to enjoy it on the day itself.

Still, every ten years or so, circumstances will shift our plans. The year this was taken, my Mom had a job at the new REI store and had to work right up to Christmas itself. We had to push back our travel time by a few days, though we still were able to visit all the people and places we usually go to.

Still, it meant we were at home for Christmas for the first time in years, and Mom wanted a tree.

It didn’t need to be a big tree, since we’ve got a small house. Besides, we’d be gone for a few weeks after Christmas. We needed a tree that wasn’t going to dry out and drop needles everywhere while we were gone. So a standard tree wouldn’t work, and none of us like artificial trees.

Then we saw the rosemary trees at the local Trader Joe’s. It’s not a pine tree, but the rosemary plant (which has pine-like needles), trimmed in the standard Christmas tree shape. It’s about 2 feet tall and potted. If you wanted to, you could plant it in your garden and have rosemary for seasoning your food. It’s even a spice that’s frequently used in the classic Christmas dinner of turkey and stuffing and potatoes and all those wonderful foods. It was perfect for what we needed.

So we took it home, and set it on the coffee table next to our living room loveseat. We got a strand of pretty lights, wrapped it around the tree, and then put what few ornaments we had on it. And a wrapped candy cane Dad got from the office. I even had a few tiny presents that year, so I made origami boxes out of wrapping paper (the only thing I firmly remember from my Girl Scout days) so we even had some presents under the tree.

The other presents went on the couch. The one in the large box visible in the background was larger than the tree.

Alas, the rosemary tree didn’t do too well not being watered for two weeks, so it didn’t live to Spring for planting. Still, it lasted longer than most Christmas trees do.

  

Snow-covered Christmas Tree, Light-covered Too.

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Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: December 2008

It’s in the 90’s here, and will be all goose-wrangling week. So it’s time for snow pictures again! Happy falling flakes, and I’m not just talking about me!

For Christmas, we just about always go north to visit the grandparents. Usually we spend Christmas itself with my Mom’s folks, out in the far north of Michigan, right in the lake effect snow belt.

Lake effect snow belts are areas where a large amount of snow falls in a region because of the presence of a large body of water (the lake) upwind from the region. As the weather frontlines pass over the lake, the clouds collect water from the warm lake, filling up the clouds. Then the frontline hits the colder land and the moisture falls right back out of the clouds, as snow. In this case, it is Lake Michigan, which is quite large and thus produces a very large amount of snow. For up to a hundred miles away from the lake, large fluffy flakes fall from the sky. It’s very common for there to be multiple feet of snow on the ground for most of the winter.

Christmas, though, is right near the start of the snow season in Michigan. Some years very little snow has fallen and we have a green Christmas. White Christmases are much more common. Even this last Christmas, when very little snow had fallen anywhere in the country, we had a small bit of snow fall on Christmas morning itself. It melted by the next day but still, we had snow for Christmas.

This photo was not from last year. This was a much snowier year.

The dunelands of northwest Michigan seem to be a great place for growing Christmas trees, given just how many Christmas Tree farms there are in the area. My grandparents don’t get their tree from those farms, though. They have a stand of trees of their own, planted a while ago. Every year Grandpa goes out and cuts one down. They’ve grown too tall for putting inside the house, so they get leaned against the deck right outside the living room and decorated with lights and some ornaments. And natural snow.

We don’t put any delicate ornaments on the tree, nor do we put the presents under the tree (they’d get wet). Instead they go out in a pile on the porch, and get distributed on Christmas morning in a more orderly fashion. We’ve never tried to pretend that the presents came from anyone but the actual giver, so I never had that classic time of learning Santa wasn’t real. I’d never been deceived in the first place. We do occasionally use “From Santa” for gifts the giver wants to keep a bit more anonymous (aka joke gifts), but we’re just as likely to put a dog’s name in there instead. My dogs have given some really interesting presents over the years.

It’s not a typical Christmas tableau. We don’t have the pile of presents carefully placed (after the kids go to bed, of course) under an ornately decorated tree. There are no cookies and milk left out overnight. We don’t even do stockings any more (we did for a few years, but it fell to the wayside). Still, it is full of family togetherness and joy, and we all happily open our presents and munch on the popcorn balls Grandma makes. Which is one of the few things she actually likes cooking, so we don’t have a full Christmas Dinner either.

  

Farms all kinda look the same, well, unless you’re a farmer.

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Location Taken: Rest Area most likely in Ohio
Time Taken: May 2011

There’s an odd aspect of rest areas: they’re located in areas where the land was cheap and available, which usually means far into the country. They’re surrounded by forests and farms, sometimes right on the other side of the fence.

I’ve got farming in the blood. Mainly dairy farming, but still, farming. None of my close relatives farm, though. My grandfathers both became engineers (Civil on Mom’s side, Mechanical on Dad’s). Their kids followed suit with more technical fields, and the grandkids are the same. Still, I’ve got some second cousins who grew up on farms and likely will farm. Oddly enough, that’s on the sides of the family I spend little time with. I did visit a family dairy farm once when I was younger, the one and only time I spent a full week with my paternal grandmother. That whole side of the family is really not at all bit on talking and family gatherings, though. My Mom’s side is much more social, though my maternal grandmother’s side (the one I spend most of my time with) is oddly social, given that we’ve got a strong genetic tendency towards social phobia. Our yearly family reunions tend to be quiet events. My Grandpa’s side is more social, but I’ve barely met them. They do farm, though, and one of them still works the farm my Great-Grandpa owned. Technically when this posts I’ll have already gone to my first family reunion on that side, but I’m writing this early.

Gardens are much more my speed. My mom has a decent-sized garden, and her mother has a large one. Me, I’ve got a few houseplants. I’d kinda like to try greenhouse or hydroponic gardening at some point. My problems with sunlight make standard gardening less than optimal. I like homegrown veggies and herbs, though. And it’s solidly a good idea health-wise and budget-wise, assuming you eat as many veggies as I do.

I also like the looks of the wall gardens I’ve seen, and some of the indoor climate gardens, the ones that provide clean air and cooling for a building far better than AC does, if nowhere near as easily. Maybe I’ll try some of those when I get my own space where I can experiment with such things. My house is too small, plus the only room I feel comfortable messing around with to that degree is my bedroom, which I keep too dark for just about every plant. The new shoots for my ZZ plant
keep coming up very pale…

  

Sewing a Tear in Time

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Time Created: December 2006

I’ve been embroidering just about all this last week. It’s just a premade cross-stitch kit from the local Ben Franklin store, a pretty lighthouse on some rocks, with a map for the background. For whatever reason, whenever I walk into that store, I gravitate over to the craft section and usually pick up something. It’s probably a good thing there isn’t a Ben Franklin near home, else I’d be spending a lot of my money on these crafts.

I don’t recall when I first learned how to sew, but I know I learned from my Mom. She enjoys sewing and embroidery. We even have a loom in our house, not that we’ve been able to use it for more than just coat storage for years, since our house is so small storage is a high priority. She’s currently working on a large quilt, though.

Sewing and embroidery seem to be becoming lost arts. Well, maybe not lost, but certainly hobby-level. It’s far more economical to buy a cheap shirt made in China than to spend the time making your own clothes. It wasn’t this way even when I was younger, well, either that or my Mom really liked making clothes for her little girls. It still helps to know some basic sewing in order to fix small holes. Still, most of my friends in college were rather impressed with my domestic skills. Very few of them could cook, much less sew. Any time I had a tear, or wanted to make something simple, I’d whip out my needle and thread and get to work.

I’m really old-school when it comes to sewing, too. I greatly prefer hand-sewing to sewing with a machine. It takes far longer but I greatly prefer the results. Admittedly, the fact that our sewing machine is currently broken so that it only sews backwards doesn’t help. I tried sewing the outfit I made for working at the Renaissance Festival with it and, well, I’ve had to replace almost all of the seams after three years of use. And sewing the hem of a skirt is a whole lot of hand-sewing. It’s somewhere between 6 and 9 feet long. Still, I greatly prefered making my own clothes for that over buying or borrowing some. I could design it in colors that flatter me, in a style that’s both simple and appealing, and can actually work in both cold and hot weather, rain or sun. All I have to do is loosen a few of the ties on the outfit and the air can flow through it just fine, and it’s made of flannel and microsuede, great fabrics for working outside. They’re tough fabrics, too.