One Week Down

Well, the first week of my summer season is behind us. I survived; obviously. We had two school field trips this wee and I generally consider field trips  the hardest parts of my summer, so it's all downhill from here. (Or uphill, if you're Zach Galifianakis.)

I'd love to tell you all about the wonderful summertime routine I've fallen into, but the truth is, I haven't quite gotten there yet. I've been trying to get up earlier in the morning (especially since it's light out at 5 a.m. around here) so I have time to exercise, get some chores done, and eat a decent breakfast before heading to work. The breakfast below looks decadent, but those "pancakes" are actually just two eggs whisked together with a mashed banana and some cinnamon. I usually don't buy bananas, but in the last couple weeks, our taste buds must have shifted for the summer because suddenly we can't get enough of fresh produce. I stocked up on berries, fruit, veggies, and salad greens on Wednesday and we're already running low.

It's been a little different week around here. I haven't fallen into having set days off yet (due to the aforementioned school field trips) and this week I re-learned just how hard it is to keep up with exercise, housekeeping, and freelance obligations this time of year. I actually missed my first run on Wednesday morning because we'd spent the night in town so we could get laundry and other errands wrapped up early so I could have a full day in the garden. (Don't worry, I'll make the run up tomorrow morning.) Then on Wednesday night, a good friend came for supper and spent the night. In addition, we've got the gardens completely planted starting Monday and wrapping on Wednesday. We've also been experiencing our first real "summery" weather (yuck - why can't it just be 65 degrees all the time?) and yesterday evening we had a crazy bout of wind that created  - swear to God - five foot swells in the bay.

How was your week?
 

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Don't Be So Defeatist, Dear

No new posts in a week?! Someone must have gone back to work full time this week. . . .

All winter long, I've posted three posts a week like clockwork to this here blargh, but then on Monday I worked my first eight hour day outside of the home in nearly seven months and before I knew it, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, even Friday  had all passed me by while Of Woods and Words sat in radio silence. Don't act like you're surprised.

I constantly overestimate my abilities and/or the amount of free time during the summer and then am always shocked when things start to fall to the wayside. On Thursday morning, for the first time in a long, long time, I woke up to a stack of dirty dishes next to the kitchen sink. To say it was a displeasing (nay, disappointing) sight would be to put things mildly. All week I've struggled to find the time to work my side jobs, exercise, clean and do just about anything else outside of work other than staring blankly ahead at the Netflix du jour each night.

It's easy to focus on all the things I can't do (start a batch of bagel during a down moment in my day, spend my lunch break catching up on blog reading, or ever find time to clean the bathroom, etc. etc.) with the return to full-time, out of the house employment. And when one's workplace is 43 degrees at the start of the work day and warms all the way up to 52 degrees after eight hours, one's mind does tend to stray to the melancholy. So although I may not really be wanting to see the good in the situation, I'm trying to keep my chin up, while the words of Lady Violet ring through my mind:

But enough about me.

In other news, the lake ice finally went out on Wednesday. That's just one day before the latest ice out date for the lake in recorded history. I was kind of hoping to break the record, but I guess the open water is kind of nice too. Andy and I got the dock in last night and on Thursday evening took a rather chilly boat ride around the lake.

I've been working towards the perfect golden, crispy potatoes for a while now. No variation of roasting them in the oven gets them quite the way I want them. Mel from Mel's Kitchen Cafe finally came to my rescue on Wednesday. Check out her golden skillet potatoes. Easy peasy and so, so good. Check that one off the bucket list. ;)

It's finally warm enough to put the seedlings outdoors. Unfortunately, it's also finally warm enough for chipmunks to be up to their rascally ways. Gardening fail #1 of 2013 is me leaving the seedlings outside all day while both Andy and I were away from the house. Goodbye two Brussels sprouts, a pepper, some cabbage, and several leaves from the eggplants and kohlrabi. Live and learn. Live and learn. I try to be calm about these sorts of things because hey - it's nature, but I would have been a little more forgiving about the whole plant massacre if the chipmunk had actually eaten the leaves and plants he chomped off. It's so very demoralizing to see the chopped off leaves wilting next to the maimed plants.

About the only thing I've managed to roll over successfully from my old "working from home" schedule this week is my running. I just wrapped up week 3 of this, my most recent running attempt, and next week, I face 6 minutes running, 2 minutes walking splits. On Wednesday night, we used the car's odometer to chart how far I've been going on my runs. Including the warm up and cool down, I've been covering about 3.4 miles on each run. Not too shabby and actually, I was kind of shocked by how far it was.

I hope you've all had a wonderful week and are filling your weekend with fulfilling and restorative activities. So far today I've caught up on all my cleaning chores (including the bathroom and washing floors!), made a batch of bread and put a corned venison (more on that later if it turns out well) in the Crock pot for supper.
   

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Why We Work Hard

I work (relatively) hard not because I believe in the American dream (although I do) but because I believe it makes my life easier.

There's one obvious benefit to hard work: mo' money, mo' money. As much as it pains me to admit, money really does make life easier and can contribute to our happiness . . .  at least up to $75,000 annually. After all, it's pretty nice to not have to stress out about paying bills and to be able to sometimes not buy only the store brand at the grocery store and hard work's about the only way I've found to avoid going into shock when both my health insurance and car insurance bills are due in the same month.

Of course, the downside of hard work is less free time and that means every once in a while we need a break from the daily grind if we want to avoid total burnout. Last week's trip to Michigan, provided me with a much needed break (although I did spend much of my time away knit, knit, knitting for the Etsy shop). Then, as is apt to happen after the excitement of airports, meals out, and time away, returning to said daily grind proved a little rough during the first days back in the office.

Yesterday, when I sat down for my daily four hours of morning office work (for thee day job) I found myself loathing the whole experience. I checked the clock every couple minutes, each time horrified at how little time had passed. There were so many other things I wanted to be doing (although now that I think of it, I can't really name any of those pressing, urgent things that were consuming me yesterday morning - maybe checking Pinterest?) and the last thing I felt like doing was answering emails and editing contracts. After an interminable 9 o'clock hour, suddenly I found it was nearly noon and then it was lunchtime and time for me to turn to more personal projects.

As I wrapped up afternoon finishing up a glut of housework such as watering plants, finally taking down the outdoor Christmas lights, and cleaning the bathroom, I couldn't help but feel pleased that I'd stuck with my morning work, despite the initial unpleasantness. If I'd putzed away the morning instead of doing the office work in the morning, I'd have had to have done the office work in the afternoon and then I'd still have a dirty bathroom today.

So I believe in hard work because it generally leads to nice things, like clean bathrooms. Hard work helps us reach our goals, it inspires us to be more ambitious, and I do think it makes us happier in the end. As much as I wanted to scroll through Pinterest yesterday morning, the long term result of opting for social media over actually work would have been cranky, disappointed Ada last night. 

The brilliant C. Hope Clark (if you're a writer and not subscribed to her free weekly e-newsletter Funds for Writers, do it now!!) wrote this argument for hard work and full days in her latest editorial:

"When you land contracts, for magazines and publishers, you are temporarily owned by editors. They expect you to jump, and jump with polish. When your writing career speeds up, people expect you to perform.

"Start now, while you're in your temporary lull, and develop a habit. Create projects. Assign them goals. And show up to work everyday. Because in the future, you'll be expected to hit the ground running, and that's hard to do if you've just been lying around." 
 
So when my dearest pal, procrastination, swings by for an impromptu date, I like to turn up "Hard Work" from Fame the Musical (so cheesy, I know, but near and dear to my heart because it was the first musical I ever saw in London - in the Aldwych Theatre on the Stand in April 2003) and get down to business.



Happy Monday!
 

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A New Year

I turned 28 yesterday. At this point in my life, especially since I  live so far away from the vast majority of my friends, birthdays really are just another day and yesterday was no exception. In fact, we lost an hour of my birthday to daylight saving time, it snowed three or so heavy inches the night before which made my commute home from my parents' take an extra 40 minutes, I worked more than I played  (yes, I know it was a Sunday) and I capped the night off alone watching an HBO documentary about the 1980 USA hockey team since Andy was off at a sports show for work and didn't arrive home until the wee morning hours today.

Okay, so maybe the start of my 29th year doesn't sound terribly great on paper, but I assure you I had a perfectly lovely day.

For one thing, I'm rather glad to have missed out on being a member of the 27 club. Whew! My brother did subtly point out to me yesterday that I perhaps have not lived my life in notorious enough of a manner to rank up there with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse even if I had met an untimely demise last year. You know what? I'm okay with that.

Honestly, I'm kind of excited about 28. I've always had a fondness for the number 8. My hockey jersey numbers were 8 and 18 and I remember both of those ages fondly. At eight I totally rocked the second and third grades (advanced reading group, holler) and met the love of my life (#notreallyelementaryschoolsweethearts), while eighteen brought my first trip overseas (hello lover, erm, London) , high school graduation and the start of college. So even if this belief is somewhat delusional, I feel as though 28 might just serve up something big, exciting, and wonderful. Maybe? Just maybe? Maybe not?

I've been hearing via the blogosphere that our 20s end up being our time for searching, stretching, and well, more often than we'd like to admit, struggling. Now our 30s on the other hand (or so I'm told) is when we really get to settle in and thrive. So although I have a few years (okay, two) to go before hitting the big 3-0, I do feel that I'm getting closer to a point in my life where I can settle down a little bit and enjoy the fruits of my labor. At least I hope so, because I rather loudly proclaimed to a colleague yesterday morning, "I'm tired of making hay!" in response to the infamous "make hay while the sun shines" quip.

I think we all get a bit weary of making hay every now and then. Last week my motivation tanked and decided to throw myself a little pity party over the fact that I live in the forest far, far away from the rest of my friends. (I may spend a little too much time alone in the winter.) But this week is not only a new week, but a new year for me, so I'm planning to head forth with a better attitude and a deeper acknowledgement of the beauty around me.

The amaryllis we received last Christmas is blooming again

At 9 p.m. last night, when I was telling myself, you have to work, you don't get to paint your toenails, I thought what the heck, it is my birthday. Just paint your toenails already. Maybe 28 will see me letting go of my delusion that I can and will work 14 hour days and then being consistently disappointed in myself for failing my lofty and unattainable performance goals? We can hope.

I'm sure this color (cranberry cream) was very trendy when I bought it in 2001

I spent the weekend with my parents watching the boys state high school hockey tournament (and a fair amount of Parks and Recreation in between games). Although none of the northern teams came out on top, I had a great time introducing my parents to the wonder of Twitter during the game - it was pretty fun to watch #thetourney trending away.

Oh, there was birthday key lime pie too yesterday. If you want proof of just how old I am, please note that I expressly requested a large piece of pie at my birthday dinner which . . . I could not finish. What is the world coming to?!

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Transitions, Darkness and Working at Home

Here we go again: transition time at Of Woods and Words. Not counting the many, many seasonal changes we have each year, we go through two major transitions annually: when I go to work full-time out of the house each May, and when I starting working from home again each October. Both transition periods have their hiccups, but arguably the autumn transition back to working from home is more difficult because I feel a need to transform myself into homemaker extraordinaire, freelancer extraordinaire, and Etsy extraordinaire, while also attending to the demands of my day job. (Whew! I'm just glad there aren't pets or children in that mix!)

Full time work officially ended last Sunday and over the last eight days, I've been bouncing between home and work, trying to get everything set so I can truly start working from by the end of this week. The first week after closing up for the season is always discombobulated: the last board meeting of the season, packing up the building, moving the office to the cabin, and making sure everything's set to over winter without freezing, shattering, or being gnawed on by vermin.


It's really easy to be way too hard on yourself during these times of transition. I've been sleeping far too much this past week. Despite my best intentions to get up and at it before sunrise, it's so dark in the mornings, and the bed is so awfully warm and cozy, that by the time I drag myself out from the covers each morning, I already feel like I'm behind.

It doesn't help my motivation that I devoted last Monday morning to making an editorial calendar for myself which when completed, I looked at and went "Holy shite, no wonder I'm always feel like I'm forgetting something." Even when I drop my day job obligations from 40 hours a week to a mere 16, I'm still over-scheduled. So perhaps before I move forward much farther during this work at home season, I need to figure out some ways to work smarter, rather than harder.(I.e. make more money while either doing the same, or less work.)

Then there's the fact that Baja went to shop last Thursday and was given a 4K diagnosis (why hullo there new transmission, clutch, timing belt, et al.) from a very reputable mechanic. After weighing just about every option out there (declaring a total loss, car loans, becoming a one car household, etc. etc.) we're repairing it since that's most economical and environmentally conscious thing to do, which means I'm not exactly in a position to pass up any paying work that I can get. Whenever I claim that there's some conspiracy against my using motorized equipment, Andy says I'm being silly. But honestly, even my KitchenAid mixer exploded after only two years of use. It's fine. It's really getting rather amusing by this point.

In the last 15 days, I think the sun's shone about seven whole hours and we're all feeling a little gloomy. I forgot I even had Halloween decorations until I was cleaning the back bedroom on Saturday and happened upon the holiday decorations box in the closet. Yesterday, it snowed all morning (and actually stuck to the ground and accumulated), so it's been a little confusing what season it actually is. Most likely, with Halloween being just two days away now, the Halloween decorations will spend all of 2012 hibernating away in the closet.

Although it's a rather dark, bumpy transition time at the moment, I'm trying not to focus on what hasn't been getting done, and instead focus on what I have been accomplishing. Suppers are certainly tastier now that I have a little more time to devote meal prep and the house is at its tidiest in months. And look, I even created an Etsy shipping corner in the back bedroom! It's about the little things . . . right? Quality of living is definitely improving around here.

Certainly, there's a need to bump up productivity. I just have to remember that being kind to myself as the seasonal darkness creeps in, and creating light from within rather than being dependent on sunshine and long days to elevate my mood, is probably the best way to make the annual transition into working from home go smoothest.

 

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Me and the Universe

When I took my current job, I told Andy "Three years. That's how long I give that job."

And here we are, more than halfway through my third season, and I can hear the Freudian slips in the conversation every time I talk about my job. "Next year we'll . . . How I think we'll do it next year is . . . "

Next year, next year, next year.

Next year?? Why the heck am I talking about next year like it's a done deal? I haven't signed any contracts. The year ahead remains an open book.

It's no secret that my current job's potential for professional development is low. As the only employee, I'm both at the top and bottom of the work hierarchy. There's a finite amount that my salary can raise, no matter how many years I'm with the organization. There are only so many job responsibilities for me to take on. While it's not really a dead-end job, it is literally a job at the end of a dead-end road.

And you know, I'm respected and trusted in my job and like any job (especially one that deals with the public daily) there are great days and not so great days. What I'm saying is: really, it's a pretty good deal. It's just not the sort job that you could do year in and year out for, oh, the next twenty years, without feeling that maybe you squandered just the teensiest, tiniest bit of your career potential.

Yet somehow three seasons have flown on by and here I am, still in the woods with limited employment options and I. Don't. Know. What. Comes. Next.

Should I go back to school and get a law degree? No, lawyers aren't getting jobs anymore.

Should I get my MFA or MBA? I don't really fancy taking on that much debt, particularly when I'm so close to shrugging off my remaining undergraduate student loans.

Should I take a government job and relax with (relative) job security and health insurance?

Should, should, should I?

I seem to have a mild obsession with forward motion and upward mobility. But I'm rapidly reaching the end of my plotted out life and the thought of not knowing what comes next is a little disconcerting for this anal-retentive planner and plotter.

It's not that I'm at a crossroads. Rather, I'm barrelling down the freeway and it turns out the exits are farther apart than I'd anticipated.  Kind of like when you're driving through North Dakota, an awful lot of time has passed, but I don't feel like I've gotten anywhere. And once again, I'm dreading the question "What comes next." It's so easy to feel guilty about having an uncertain future. I have a feeling that one result of the Great Recession is a lot of uneasy, slightly guilty feeling 20-somethings.

So rather than feeling guilty, now is the time to embrace the unknown. After all, you can't plot out your entire life on a calendar. Life just isn't much fun if it's lived like a checklist. So in the months to come, I'm leaving the roadmap behind (just for the teensiest, tinest bit) and taking it as it comes.  . . . even if I do find the idea absolutely terrifying.

 

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The Cyclical Nature of Seasonal Employment

If you're lucky enough to be employed in this part of the world, chances are, you have some sort of season work. A few resorts, like the one Andy works for, have year round business, although he'll be the first to tell you, they're all shocked if someone books a cabin in April and November. And of course there are certain year-round positions that must exist in any small community: grocery story owners, doctors, the mail lady, gas station employees, etc.

But I have always seemed to end up with the seasonal job: the one that goes from May through September, or at the very latest, into October. Although my job now is full time and pays quite well, it only lasts for just over 5 months of every year. Not only does seasonal work make for interesting, creative finances, it also perpetuates the feeling that you should head off to school -- or some place new -- every autumn.

In fact, there's a certain cycle, a certain rhythm to each season. It begins with shock, horror, and more horror . . . oh wait, I made a graphic to explain it all better:

You're welcome.

So, as I was saying, there's a cycle to this seasonal employment thing. The cycle repeats its twice a year: once during the "on-season", again in the off.

It begins with shock. This settles in around the end of April. The inner monologue goes something like this: "Nearly time to go back to work again. Crikey where did that come from? Wasn't it just October?"

The shock is quickly replaced by horror. "I have to back to work?! What about baking bread, knitting sweaters, listening to NPR, and counting "not going broke" as one of my highest accomplishments? I was just getting settled in. You honestly don't expect me to go deal with real problems and real people, do you?"

But once you get back in the swing of things, say, after a couple weeks or so, some excitement builds up. It's going to be a great year. There's so much possibility, so much to do and conquer. At long last, out of the stuffy old cabin.

Unfortunately, the excitement is tarnished by terrible realizations. Realizations such as: you don't like people, you have no idea how to coordinate volunteers, despite your 26 years of life, you remain deathly afraid of the telephone. Expect these realizations to start trickling in around the Fourth of July.

As those realizations stop trickling and start gushing, you enter a state of blase. Blame your piss-poor attitude on Mercury Retrograde. That's what I do. 

But those grey skies can't stay grey forever and blahs are eventually pushed aside for a long, calm period of acceptance. It is what it is. It's a job. It pays. And there are way more good days then there are bad. It's a pretty sweet gig after all.

Which brings us back to shock. The state in which I currently rest. Somehow September got gobbled on down and now we're in October, less than two weeks away from the season's close. How did that happen? Wasn't it just May? I'm not ready for this. I can't handle it. Oh, the horror. The horror!

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The Home Stretch

I spent all summer viewing this past weekend's wedding as "the end." At "the end" of summer we had a wedding to go to. It always seemed a long ways off.

When I bought a dress to wear to the event back in May, it seemed absurd to be thinking so far in advance, almost as if the end of September would never roll around.

But it did.

This past weekend we headed down to central Minnesota for the hitchin'. Before we'd really gotten our bearings, the couple was happily married and we were heading home again. 

Now, there's absolutely no denying that autumn is here. When I walked home from work last night, I was shocked to discover docks anchored in the middle of our bay. The ice and snow may still be a month or two off, but the summer residents clearly already have their hearts set on warmer locations. Getting the cabin closed up for winter is a task all summer residents face; a task that involves draining pipes, shutting off pumps, and detaching docks from the shore so the ice doesn't destroy them. Soon our cabin will be the only light shining out over the bay each night.

 It's not like autumn hasn't given me any warning signs. The tomato plants on the deck have been dead for nearly two weeks now and the woods have been filled with the musty, almost sweet smell of decaying leaves. But it's been such an odd month of strange work schedules and perhaps a few too many commitments, that I hadn't been paying that much attention to the changing world around me. I finally noticed that fleeting autumn light yesterday when Andy and I headed out for an early morning stroll. 

It's true we're on the home stretch of the summer season. Soon that nip in the air will be downright cold. The leaves will fall; the snow will come. But until then, I plan to marvel and exclaim over the world's beauty; to take a minute and soak it all in. 

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On Why I've Made No Plans for the Winter

I've had to cover up the finally fruiting green beans up two nights in a row. Last night it dipped down to 22 degrees and steam rises off the lake each morning. But despite the chilly temps, I've spent very little time thinking about the winter months to come.

It's a summer Emily over at the Happy Home and her fiance have labeled "bummer summer." Here at Of Woods and Words? Maybe not a bummer summer, but certainly a static one.

Projects that sat unfinished at the start of the summer remain half done. Gigs I enjoy doing have fallen by the wayside until I finish with the 40 hour work weeks in a month's time. It feels like in this push to make ends meet, by balancing writing and a full-time, seasonal job, everything suffers. My performance at work would be much improved if it was my sole focus. My freelance writing career might not feel so prone to fits and starts if I contributed a consistent amount of attention to it year-round.

The truth is, I've been distracted. By pumpkins, among other things.

To really make summer work and to make the extra money and procure the work necessary to get me through the lean winter months, I really should put in a 10-20 hour work week from my home office each week on top of my 40 hours outside the house. You can probably guess by the dwindling blog posts this summer that that's not be how things are going. Instead, I've spent the summer berrypicking, having cookouts, paddling, hiking, gardening. When given the choice to write some query letters or bake up some pumpkins to mash and freeze, I've inevitably chosen pumpkins.

The other week, my brother asked me what my short-term goals were; where I wanted to be in three years or so. I wasn't really sure how to answer. Lately, I've spent very little time thinking about goals, although I know goals are the stepping stones to get where you want to go. I have a general idea of what I want: more financial security, more independent work, more travel opportunities, maybe some chickens.

And in a slow shuffling way, I feel like I am moving in that direction and I don't want to have a life so career focused that I don't get moments to watch Netflix with Andy, or knit up a pair of socks or can some applesauce. If these sound like excuses, they're really not meant to be. Really, they're realizations; that there are more important things to me than putting my foot on the gas of my career and going full steam ahead. There's a certain level of contentedness I'm not willing to forgo, even if making myself a little more uncomfortable would mean more money and opportunity.

Of course they say, it's about the little things. It's the big picture that's evading me, and maybe that's okay. So no, I haven't made much in the way of winter plans. Instead, I guess I'll "open my heart and come what may."

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Keeping "Genuinely" Cool

This probably isn't much of a confession because y'all have probably figured out that I have a soft spot for romantic comedies. In particular British romantic comedies. Especially anything with Hugh Grant. Namely, Notting Hill. (Who knew . . . oh right, you guys did.)

I like Notting Hill so much I have the webpage that hosts the movie's entire script bookmarked because often IMDB fails to list my favorite quotes from the movie. (You know you're a nerd when . . . .) It's not that I find the movie particularly deep, hard hitting, or even that intelligent, but it's comforting -- like a cup of tea held between both hands during your first morning hour and there always seems to be some line from Notting Hill  that sums up my current mood completely. Take this little gem from Honey (William's googly eyed sister who has feathers for hair) for example: 

Oh God this is one of those key moments in life, when it's possible you can be really, genuinely cool -- and I'm going to fail a hundred percent.

Oh God, yes. This is exactly how I feel right now.

It's also no secret that I've been a wee bit absent from the blogosphere as of late. As much as I mean to stick with my Monday-Friday posting through the summer, lately my creativity's been feeling a little tapped out. After spending all winter getting words onto paper, with the return of the 40-hour work week, I find my brain not even working in a writerly way. For the second commentary in a row, I find myself utterly stumped about what to pen my next radio commentary about. When I sit down to write, I feel like I'm trying to get a stubborn lawn mower to start. I yank and I yank and I yank on the pull cord and all I get from my writer's engine is a cough, a choke, and then, nothing.  

I'm not sure why I expect more out of my writer's engine these days. After all, I'm pretty much expecting it to perform when it's running on empty.  Mornings are spent trying to get a couple words hammered out before heading to work. When I come home, there's supper to make, the gardens to tend, and yet another wedding afghan to knit.

Oh excuses, excuses, excuses.

Except I don't have time for excuses. The next commentary must get written and two articles are due on Friday. Luckily one article just needs to be written; the other I still need to track down interviews for. (Yikes!)

I'm trying to be genuinely cool, I swear. It's just that I'm failing a hundred percent.

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Transplanting

Yesterday, we had a break in the drizzly, cool weather and I managed to sandwich transplanting all seedlings into their forever homes of raised beds and flower pots around a full work day. This meant changing into my grubby clothes twice in one day, but really, it had to be done. 

I know half of you have had your gardens in for at least two weeks so least you think I'm a slacker, let me assure you that around here we don't dare plant outside until Memorial Day weekend. June 1 is pretty much the unofficial "it probably won't freeze again until September" date. Then again, it might freeze on July 4. You've got to keep your head on a swivel in these parts.

And this shall be dubbed "Salsa Escalade" (Peppers, tomatoes and tomatillos)

I've been feeling a bit transplanted myself lately. The whole return to work thing has turned my weekly schedules and daily routines upside down. While I know I should feel like the transplanted seedlings, all refreshed with a cool drink of water and ready to spread out my roots, the truth is that I feel more like I've gone from my roomy home in the raised bed and am now trying to shove myself back into a seed starting tray. Just . . . not.  . .quite . . . enough . . . room.

Hmmm, they looked bigger when they were in their trays. (Broccoli, kohlrabi, cabbage; zucchini and squash in the plastic bottle "cloches")

It's the time of the year when both my successes and my failures become a little more obvious to the entire world. Plants that have been nurtured along all spring get put out in the elements, where they'll either thrive or flop. (I've already managed to kill off one basil plant.) We'll see just how much the plants really like the "soil" (a mixture of sand, peat moss, top soil and humus and manure) we placed in the new raised bed garden. And we'll see how long I can maintain perpetual busy-ness before I just want to curl up in a ball in bed.

Sometimes I forget that transplanting is an adjustment period for both me and the plants. It's a shock to suddenly find ourselves submerged in brand-new surroundings we're supposed to feel instantly at home in. "But this place is a little shadier than where I've come from," we think. "I'm not sure if this soil is quite ready for us."  

Onions, garlic, carrots, radishes, herbs, and mystery plant

But with plenty of water and a bit of sunshine, this will all be feeling like everyday in no time.

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Dressing to Impress

I believe in the power of fashion. I believe looking nice and together and wearing clothes that fit and flatter will help your case in getting ahead in life. I also believe in comfort, which is why occasionally you'll still find me dressed like a college freshman on laundry day.

Take this weekend for instance. It's been a drizzly string of days with nothing but bad internet so I saw no reason not to pull on my ratty sweatpants with the words "Alpha Chi" (the name of a dorm wing I lived in during college) emblazoned on the hiney, a loose-fitting t-shirt, and a Hard Rock Cafe Dublin sweatshirt I bought in 2005 when it started snowing on me in Ireland. (You can take the girl out of Minnesota but you can't take the snow out of . . . wait, I never did figure out how to make that saying clever and applicable for this setting.)

The sweatshirt in its infancy

But remember how it's been rainy around here? Over the weekend, I ran out of indoor tasks and without being able to work in the gardens, I felt a little lost. So I decided to pop over to work for a minute yesterday to deliver some boxes.

When I pulled up to the gate at work, I discovered I'd been locked out. (Yes, I drove all by myself!) Because the museum leases the property from a federal agency, both the feds and the museum peeps have separate locks on the gate. (The feds use a universal key system, so if they gave us the key to their gate padlock, they'd give us the key to a whole lot of other things too.) So there's one padlock for each end of the chain . . . not exactly rocket science. Except when there are new employees, or if another agency is working in collaboration with our feds, sometimes they get confused by this complex lock system and end up locking us out. Which is exactly what happened.

I spent the first half hour minutes of the three hours I'd planned to spend at the museum, on the phone, trying to get someone over to unlock the gate.While I cradled the phone between my shoulder and chin, I looked around to see what creature was making such a ruckus in the other room. Which is when I spied a squirrel dancing across the rafters.

After forty minutes the gate was open and the squirrel had gone on his merry little way. With the gate open, I hauled my load into the museum and started working away. Which is when all the people started showing up.

First a family with artifacts they wanted to donated. Then some volunteers dropping off more boxes. And another volunteer who wanted to test the alarm system and troubleshoot some electrical problems.

"Man, I better get out of here before anyone else shows up," I thought to myself. But I really wanted to finish the project I was working on. Which is when two separate groups of community members showed up to wander the grounds. Since one of the said individuals helped get the museum a large grant without which the museum would not exist, I was in no position to kick them out. And besides, remember the gate? I can't leave and lock up until everyone's cleared out of the parking lot anyway.

Once everyone had cleared out, the agency who'd locked us out and who had been using our parking lot, pulled up to the dock in their boats. For the next half hour, they worked to load their boats on trailers, effectively blocking the driveway and cutting off my escape route!

5 and a half hours later, it was after 4 p.m. and I'd only had a granola bar for lunch. Could it get any worse?

I looked down.

I'd been wearing my ratty sweats the entire time.

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Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho

Pussywillows

The pussywillows have turned into downy ovals, tipped with pollen. On the porch, yesterday afternoon, the sunshine warmed my face and scalp into a nice bright red glow. It's northern Minnesota's second spring.

As you've probably noticed, our winter isn't usually ready to let go when spring pops up on the calendar. When March 20th rolls around, it signals little more than a growing anxiousness that someday (soon?) all this winter stuff will be behind us. It's not until mid May, when the ice goes out and wildflowers start to bloom that it really, truly start to appear to be spring like the rest of the world knows the season.

This second spring seems to spark productivity. It's hard to resist the allure of the outdoors when you can run around in a t-shirt and play in the dirt.

We were meant to be out on a canoe trip this past week, but the late ice out and my absence earlier in the month hampered planning. So instead we spent Andy's vacation time last week at home . . . building this monstrosity. 

Here's a little "did you know" for you: a 8' x 16' garden needs an awful lot of soil. Three trips to town and we've finally got it nearly filled with soil. Now, will anything grow in said soil remains a mystery!

Other "late spring" chores got done too. The boat is in, the perennial beds are mostly weeded, the shed has been cleaned out. 

Even some knitting got (mostly) finished up.

Second spring also means a return to full-time, out of the house work for me. It's always pretty bittersweet: hooray for secure finances, boo to 40 hours of not exactly soul satisfying work. But heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work with me today.

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Discombobulation

At long last, the summer season is wrapping up and I have just three (THREE!) days of work left. I've been looking forward to the winter months with uncharacteristic longing this year and since business has slowed to a mere trickle of daily business, it's proving to be time to shut up shop and direct energies otherwise.

Because Wednesdays have been a bear to get covered all season and since we close on Sunday, I begrudgingly  selflessly decided to shift my weekly schedule back a day, so that instead of working Thursday-Monday this week, I'm working Wednesday - Sunday this week, and just took Tuesday off. On paper, the move made perfect sense. In reality, I'm having a hard time figuring out what day of the week it is. Feels like a Saturday to me, but thankfully, it's just Friday, since Friday happens to be a deadline day.

Got up this morning to finish up my monthly writing assignments. I'm flirting dangerously with the deadline, but am basically done. Huzzah!

While I got up this morning at a reasonable time, Andy did not. Having come down with "the crud", he's laid up in bed, sniffling away.

It's all a little discombobulating. What day is it again?

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Occupational Hazards

This spring someone asked if I had a pocket knife they might borrow. I hoisted my "Sex and the City" tote bag higher on my shoulder and looked around, assuming they'd been talking to someone else. Just because I live in the woods, one shouldn't forget my pile of high-heeled shoes collecting dust in a corner. In lots of ways it feels that woods chose me more than I chose them and as a result, I'm not the most proactive woods resident. Pocket knife? What pocket knife?

Still, I'm not Carrie Bradshaw. I'm not going to throw a fit if a squirrel scampers up on the windowsill. I'm pretty in sync with the other animal residents of my neighborhood. The squirrels, chipmunks, birds, foxes, etc., all have a special place in my heart.

But going back to the whole not always being that proactive . . . . For whatever reason, despite having grow up in older houses, I'd never actually set a mouse trap until this summer. But when you work in a 76-year-old building that was never winterized, you learn pretty quickly. Now I think nothing of setting mouse traps or wiping bat crud off the cabin's bathroom walls, for that matter.

Yet I wasn't quite prepared for the woodland intruder I found beneath my desk at work last week: a little garter snake. He was just a teeny little snake who must have slithered through the crack by the front door, probably to soak up some of the sunlight the large slab of slate next to my desk had absorbed.

Years ago, in my kindergarten days, we rented an old house that seemed to be a veritable garter snake refuge. My brother and I often were called upon to remove snakes from the basement or stairwell. But after one of the snakes defecated on me (one of their defense mechanisms), the chore kind of lost its enjoyment. I looked at the little snake and thought, "I could live a long happy life without having to touch you."

Luckily one of the visitors had a thing for snakes. She thought nothing of crouching down by the desk and pulling the snake out by his tail. Here's our bold little snake. He really wasn't too scary. We got him back in the woods in no time, although he left our fearless snake remover a present by musking on her hands before she let him go.

I apologize if this not how one should properly hold a snake. The intent was not animal cruelty but to release the snake into his natural habitat.

That's just life in the woods.

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Something in the Air

Lately, there’s been something in the air. At first, as a series of blustery days churned up the lakes, riled the trees, and brought in cooler air, I assumed that strange buzz in the atmosphere was simply autumn’s arrival. But the fact that temperature inside my work place today reached 91.1 degrees today pretty much debunked that theory.

And there’s still something in the air. A sense of energy. And even more than a sense of energy, some sort of urgency. Something that prompts me to keep going even when my mind tells me the day is done. Something that has me reaching for the “get some zzzs” herbal tea on an 85 degree evening.

Maybe it’s the result of the solar storms last week that painted the night sky in lovely shades of northern lights.

 

Northern Lights | WTIP North Shore Community Radio, Cook County, Minnesota

Or maybe it has to do with planet alignment. Whatever it is, the last week I find my days starting strong, only to spend most of the work day cranky yet after heading home and making supper, I am struck by a sudden urge to “go” just when it really should be time to turn out the lights. Andy calls it the “summer doldrums.” It doesn’t seem like doldrums to me exactly (at least not early in the morning or late at night) but it definitely feels unsettled.

Part of the unsettledness is perfectly logical. The first half of the month is always more frantic than the second half as I pulled together the month’s allotment of freelance articles. Once we hit the 15th of the month, things slow down, or at least, the manner in which things unfold is based slightly more on my whims.

Tori over at Rabid Ink wrote an interesting post on working to relax and it strikes me that what she writes about might be part of what’s going on around here as of late. This summer has been a juggling act of a wide variety of projects and it’s easy to view any sort of free time as procrastination. Instead of taking a load off at the end of the day, I find it more comforting to sit at the computer and attempt to tap out a few sentences, paragraphs. Keep that up for too long and there’s bound to be a strange sense of energy in the air that’s morphed out of my control.

So I’m giving into the summer doldrums, the solar storms, the planets, visit from muse, whatever this disturbance is. I will work on freelance assignments by morning and type out commentaries in the evening hours while simultaneously blogging, scouring Writer’s Digest and Fund for Writers for ways to hone my writing craft and improve my platform, and crafting editorial calendars. It seems silly to sit passively in befuddlement when something beyond me seems to be prompting: go, go, go. Someday soon, I know I'll wake up and find whatever it was has disappeared and it'll be same ol', same ol'. But until then, I might as well get something done.

Have the summer “doldrums” or some other strange force hit where you’re at? What do you do to manage it?

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In Which Ada Becomes Trapped in a Crawl Space

It’s been one of those weeks. You know, where there’s so much going on and half of the stuff going on is stuff that needs to get done and the other stuff just looks really fun so you start getting up way too early to get all your work done and end up feeling like headache-y mess by the time 9 p.m. rolls around. It’s been kind of like that.

It’s been one of those weeks when you realize you’re probably so sluggish and cranky because you haven’t actually eaten anything in six hours. Where you start looking forward to a return to work because you need some peace and quiet after your days “off.” It’s been one of those weeks when it’s hard to look at your life with any sort of perspective.

After getting a large freelance project out the door yesterday morning, I felt better suited for a nap than a day at work. But since I innocently skipped across the magical bridge to adulthood land a few years back, I had no choice in the matter. Off to work I went.

Luckily, we were too busy at work for me to dwell on my sleep deprivation and before I knew, the day had slipped by. At closing time, I took down the bird feeders and brought them to the building’s crawl space, where we store them overnight to avoid tempting the neighborhood black bears. I lifted the latch on the outside of the crawl space’s door and stepped into the small, low space to set down the bird feeders.

Then the big gust of wind came. In a split second the crawl space door slammed shut. I pressed against the door. It had latched.

And I panicked. The pity steadily overcame the panic. I was so tired and hungry and the crawl space was dark, damp, smelly and the only thing to eat were some suet cakes and bird seed. I had to use the bathroom. I didn’t want to spend the next two hours it would take for Andy to think to come look for me with the mice in the crawl space of a historic lodge on the edge of the Boundary Waters.

I knocked lightly on the door, knowing no one was near enough to hear such a feeble declaration of my predicament. There was a thumb-sized peephole directly beneath the metal lever which had fallen in the latch. I wiggled my fingers through the hole, trying to push the lever up and out of the latch. Then I tried kicking. I kicked one, twice, and on the third time the door sprung open and I emerged into the sunlight. The whole ordeal took about 30 seconds, but it was just enough to time to make me realize that I’d rather be out in the daylight having “one of those weeks” than trapped in a dingy crawl space.

It all reminded me of how Jimi Hendrix sang: “I used to live in a room full of mirrors, all I seen was me. Well I can’t stand it no more, so I smash the mirror and set me free.” It wasn’t really that dramatic, but it kind of felt like it.

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A Severe Case of the Mondays

I once had a co-worker who worked Friday through Monday.

“Monday is my Friday,” she liked to quip to grouchy workers who slumped into work every Monday. I’m not sure it made them feel much better.

Since I now work Thursday – Monday, I thought it was pretty great that I could now adopt this quip as my own. But today I learned the hard truth of the matter. No matter what your days off, there is always a “Monday.”

And it’s not quite so much fun to have Thursday as your Monday when Friday still brings, well, “Friday” sort of deadlines.

It’s not that things were a train wreck today: all told, it was a pretty pleasant day filled with lots of nice people. But I was busy with things that really needed to be mulled over quietly, away from the hustle and bustle of a very busy public building. There were a few tense moments waiting for someone to show up who’d been significantly delayed by traffic. Then the power went out. Which made that last hour and a half of the day -- when I’d planned to catch up on email communications and the like -- just seem all the more futile since the internet server was down until closing time.

But to everything, a silver lining.

The comedy of errors of today ended up enabling me to get home in time to catch one of the first airings the CCC documentary  I’ve talked about off and on for the last five months. It’s finally done! Or at least, the first of six episodes are done. . . .

My thoughts are not coherent enough to finish up the article that needed to be submitted tomorrow. So I have an early morning spent writing and editing ahead of me tomorrow.

Let’s just hope this case of the Mondays doesn’t spread to “Tuesdays.”

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Bake or Buy: Be Happy

By all intents and purposes, the females of my generation – the Millennials – and of my socioeconomic and racial profile – middle class, Caucasian – came into this world a pretty privileged lot. Women had gotten the vote 65 years before I was born and by the time I was toddling around, the Feminist movement was on its last legs (be that good or bad). In fact, females my age sometimes take the idea of “equal opportunity” so for granted that we often treat the word “feminist” like a profanity. We didn’t have a whole lot to prove: we were accepted for who we were.

But as the first generation of women who have basically gotten whatever we wanted, we might be just a tad spoiled. We forget how hard other women fought to get us where we are today. We forget that at its heart, feminism is about equality. More than that, we forget that equality and getting whatever you want are two different things entirely. And we forget that we have feminism to thank for several general ideals we use to navigate through life.

Ideals? Well, like the fact that we can do whatever we want to do, but with that comes an obligation to find some sense of purpose in life and to live up to your full potential. It’s fine to have kids, if you want them, but we were taught that being a mother is meant to be a small part of a larger context. And also, you better be really, really into being a homemaker if that’s the path you decide to head down, young lady.

Often it seems as though I’m in a strange power struggle with feminism. I never know who’s winning and I don’t understand why we can’t just be friends. Try as I might, my inner career woman is always picking battles with my inner homemaker.

Which is why I threw a fit when I discovered we were out of bread yesterday morning. (We’ve been out of butter for ages too.)

Lately, it’s seemed like the gears are finally turning and I’m starting to slowly chug down the tracks towards my career goals. It’s exciting and fun and it means long hours and having to eat store bread while your house falls into an increasingly chaotic mess. In general, I try to keep homemade bread on hand – when there’s time -- but that’s not to say that we don’t eat a fair amount of store bread too. For the last month, we’ve been buying a loaf of bread every now and then to tide us through until I have time to bake. But instead of me finding time to make bread, mostly we’ve just been running out of bread on a pretty consistent basis.

Yesterday, when I opened the fridge door to grab the sandwich makings for my bag lunch and spied only a flat bread bag holding a single crust of bread, I felt as though something in the big scheme of things had failed me. After all: does having it all mean we’re so busy we don’t have time to stock basic food stuffs?

So today I made Betty Friedan roll over in her grave. I baked bread and brownies and attempted to make sense of the piles of crap that had accumulated around the cabin. I realized what a lot of work it is to be a homemaker. For sure, it’s a full time job (I’m exhausted), yet we largely poo-poo homemaking because we fear the great merit of homemaking – comfort – is synonymous with complacency. That’s not really fair.

Maybe the secret to being a female in 2010 is to stop feeling like you’re letting someone down. I don’t want to have to eat store bread just because I have a busy work life. I don’t want to feel like Betty Friedan is glaring at me every time I take a loaf of bread out of the oven either.

I have yet to strike the perfect balance between, well, everything. It’s tricky business determining how to best live life as a privileged female, without squandering or taking our advantages for granted. And at its heart, being a female in 2010 isn’t really about choosing one way to live your life. Rather it’s about mixing together all the life lessons from previous generations of women who taught us to be independent and determined and who reminded us that baking should be a pleasure, not a stressful obligation

So the moral of the story is this: Bake your bread when there’s time. Buy enough to last when there isn’t. Above all else, be happy. After all, we’re a pretty spoiled lot.

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How Many Hands Does It Take To Put Up Siding?

Apparently six.

By the middle of last week, Andy’d reached the point in the shed project that it was time to deal with the siding. The floors were in. The walls were up and square. And according the carpentry expert down the road, it made the best sense to put up the siding before dealing with the roof.

So Andy and I headed out back to hang some siding. The only issue was that T1-11 siding is really much heavier than it appears. Also, when you have a short ladder that just barely allows you to peep over the top of the wall, it doesn’t work so well to have someone peeping over the top attempting to see if the piece of siding is square while the other person crouches on the ground, turning red in the face, trying to support the piece of siding and make the necessary adjustments to get the siding on straight. There was complaining, bickering, frustration, and in the end, defeat.

What to do . . . . what to do?

The good thing about staying in your hometown is that there’s usually an extra pair of hands around. Yesterday, Andy’s cousin came over and between the three of us, we got two walls done. Only two more walls, a window, a door and a roof and we’ll have a shed!

Happy Solstice! We had the most exquisite long summer day yesterday: blue skies, a touch of breeze, no humidity. The garden loved it!

Today, the official kickoff of summer as far as the calendar’s concerned, is overcast and humid. Rain seems imminent and although the rain will keep from weeding the garden, it also means we won’t have to water.

In truth, as another blogger pointed out this morning, it’s not really the start of summer: it’s midsummer. It does feel much more like the middle of summer. Yesterday, after the siding success, we sat on the deck talking for a bit and realized that July 4th, that unofficial mark of summer’s halfway point, is nearly upon us. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: July 4th is the grand opening at work. The next two weeks will be the last big push there while the second half of summer this year promises to be more orderly and relaxed.

I put in a half day at work today, which got me home and fed before three. It’s going to be a busy week on the work front and I’m trying to avoid overtime. I may have to head over to work every day this week, but at least that means I have a little more time at home each day too.

I should do dishes, but I think I’m off to hunt for wild strawberries before the rain reaches us.

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