“A fulfiller of good intentions”

Get paving.

I told you, didn’t I, that I was reading a biography of Theodore Roosevelt? Actually, it was three biographies, all by Edmund Morris: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, and Colonel Roosevelt. (All quite good, by the way.)

The final volume ended with a quote from a schoolboy writing a report on the former President in 1922. Thomas Maher called Theodore Roosevelt “a fulfiller of good intentions.”

There’s something wonderful about that phrase.

You know what they say about the road to Hell? Paved with good inentions. You can’t fulfill a good intention, though, unless you have them. So, Tuesday’s Tip is to get paving–and then get fulfilling.

I hope someday the same could be said of me–“a fulfiller of good intentions”–although I am absolutely certain I fall far short of Teddy

What about you?

City mice have cleaner clothes

And do less laundry.

Not really. But it’s a good headline, isn’t it? One thing about blogging: I think I’m getting better at headlines.

The reference here is to one of Aesop’s Fables: “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.” I always knew it, as many of you probably did, as “The City Mouse and the Country Mouse.” Without rushing off to re-read it, I think, basically, it is a story about culture shock.

I thought of it today as I was doing yet another load of laundry.

See, back when I was a city mouse, it took us a total of an hour and a half to do all our laundry. Now that I live in–what?–I don’t think this is the country, and I’m not sure it’s suburbia. We’ll call it the country, though, for purposes of this discussion. That’s fair, since one could argue that anyplace outside of New York City is, by contrast, country. (Unless you live in London, maybe, or Rome.)

So, I used to be a city mouse, and we’d take our clothes down to the laundry room in the basement of our apartment building once a week. We’d fill up all four machines, come back in about 30 minutes and transfer the wet clothes to, maybe, two dryers. About 40 minutes later, we’d come back, lug them upstairs, and put them all away.

Now that I live in the country, it takes about an hour and a half four to five times a week!

One washer and one dryer–and they’re on the small size. (We’re going to get bigger ones, eventually, but these work.) Plus, the dryer is electric where the NYC dryers were gas. It makes a difference.

Granted, I can write this blog post or mow the lawn or do other things while the clothes are spinning, but I did that kind of thing in the city, too, between elevator runs. Who’d have thought, as I moved away from museums and theatres and corner delis and world-class restaurants and public transportation, that one of the things I’d miss most would be laundry rooms?

Owl Schedules

No, I’m not talking about Harry Potter.

I’m wondering about owls. Can they tell time? Has anybody ever studied this?

I can’t find anything on Google, but we have an owl that’s been coming around for the past few weeks and, honestly, she has been arriving at almost exactly the same time every evening.

Now, why is that?

Okay, so she lives in the neighborhood. Why shouldn’t she come around?

No reason at all. I would expect her to hunt around in the yards of the houses surrounding wherever she has her nest. I’d even expect that she might come nightly. What I don’t expect is that she lights in that same tree every night at 7:42 pm.

Is she punching a time clock? Do her eyes register some specific shift in light that indicates it is time to begin her appointed rounds? And are they such creatures of habit that she travels the same exact route every night? Two minutes to fly from the oak down the street to the pine tree next door. Another 20 seconds to flit to the top of the sweetgum tree.

Maybe.

But even if the route is identical night after night, doesn’t a mouse or a mole ever appear? You’d think there’d be some variation in the schedule to allow for hunting.

I haven’t seen her for a few nights, but for a while there, we could have set the clock by her.

I’m just wondering why that was.

Minn-Kota and Manatees

Waterfront living.

We’re finally getting our waterfront lifestyle together. We’ve had a small boat for a while. And our house has a boat ramp. It’s not so easy, however, to put the boat in and out of the water, since we don’t have a truck with a hitch (and since I don’t really want a truck running over my labyrinth several times a week).

So, we had to put up a boat lift.

No sooner did we get that done than all kinds of things got in the way of excursions. We had company. We had to go on a series of trips. The weather has been god-awful hot, and who wants to be out on the water in the baking sun under those conditions? We had other house projects that needed work. And then, it rained. Day after day. (The grass is looking good–but then, you have to mow the grass.)

All of this is leading up to today’s Monday Miracle–which is the latest improvement to the whole boating thing.

We got a trolling motor. A Minn-Kota Edge. Yesterday, we took it on a shake-down cruise.

It works great!

It’s bow-mounted, and so easy to put in and out of the water. Five speeds, forward and reverse, so it can get you moving pretty fast–if that’s what you want. And it’s so quiet.

This is how I like to travel by boat. I prefer the slow speed. And the quietness is great. We came right up on some manatees just hanging out in the back part of the creek where there are no houses. Because the motor is quiet, we could get fairly close. Because it is slow, we were in no danger of injuring them.

I love having manatees in the back yard. (The alligators–not so much.)

(Speaking of alligators and manatees, you can check out the Manatee Web Cam. It’s off-season for manatees at Blue Spring, so they are alternating live manatee-less streams with some videos. I like the one where the manatee chases the alligator out of the water — althoug, at my house, I’m hoping they just leave them in the water.)

Domestic skills

I don’t have them.
It is a long-established fact that I don’t cook. It’s not that I can’t cook. I’ve been known to manage a mean Thanksgiving dinner. I can bake things. If I set my mind to it, I can probably cook just about anything.

It’s just that I don’t often set my mind to it.

My mind is busy with other things.

Like–at this point–sewing machines.

Sewing. Another area of domestic dysfunction.

I have a Girl Scout sewing badge. I made an extremely ugly jumper once in Home Ec. There are buttons that owe their existence as functioning fasteners to my needle. I’ve hemmed things.

Recently, I made some curtains for the Casa.

And therein begins my tale.

Once upon a time, my mother bought me a sewing machine. It was a simple, straightforward thing. A needle, a bobbin. A couple of tension adjustment settings. A handful of different stitch lengths and types. (Zig-zag!) Forward. Reverse.

I’ve tried to use it a handful of times over the years. Something always goes wrong. Adjusting the tension is extremely tricky on it, for some reason. In addition, the needle always breaks. Always! I don’t think I’ve ever completed a simple seam on less than two, usually three needles. I’ve had it overhauled once, and the problems still continue.

After finally completing the curtains in way more days than it should have taken, we came to the conclusion that perhaps, just perhaps, it was not the operator but the machine.

At that point, my mom announced that there were three sewing machines sitting unused over at “the old house.” (The house which my mom inherited, with all its contents, from my grandmother.)

So, now we are embarked on another odyssey of trying to get one, at least, of these machines to work.

Machine #1 requires significant intervention with an oil can, if not a sledge hammer. It appears to be frozen solid. The needle won’t go up. It won’t go down. Set that one aside to take to the repair shop.

Machine #2 actually runs. It runs so well that we can’t seem to disengage the needle the way you are supposed to do in order to fill a bobbin. Set that one aside to take to the repair shop.

Machine #3 also runs. The bushings, however, that hold the spindles that hold the spools of thread, had disintegrated with age. Set that one aside. . . .No! Wait!

It turns out you can order those parts.

So, we did.

They came yesterday.

Today, we put the new parts in, and I brought the machine home to test it. I’m up to page 5 in the manual. It will sew straight lines and zig-zag lines and overcast stitches and hems and buttonholes and buttons and monograms and I-don’t-know-what-all. It beeps and buzzes and lights up, and I will need a degree in advanced programming to figure it all out.

While I’m studying it, maybe I can get the machine to cook dinner? I wouldn’t put it past it.

Divinity

Pecan, that is.

I’ve just come back from a road trip to North Carolina involving kin, cars and colleges. (And let me tell you, that was a stretch to get that alliteration into that sentence.)

My mom has a new car. She wanted to sell/give her old car to my niece. There’s just under 1200 miles between them.

Road trip!

We met in the middle to do the car hand-off and so my niece could look at a couple of colleges in North Carolina. (UNC and Duke, both gorgeous campuses!)

The thing about a road trip–aside from all the usual adventures and the rest stops and service stations, the breakfast buffets and sudden rain storms, the testily recalculating GPSs and the stiff joints–is the opportunity to revisit regional cuisines. (Or visit them for the first time, I guess, if you didn’t spend your childhood summers driving up and down I-95 like we did.)

So, there’s barbecue and country-fried steak and what have you. But. . .if you’ve never had Divinity. . .you have missed out.

We stopped at Smith’s Fireworks (no relation–just a long-standing business in South Carolina and a long-standing tradition of stopping there). And, as always, they had Pecan Divinity on sale.

Mmmm-mmmm.

Divinity consists mostly of sugar, corn syrup and egg whites. It’s not about nutrition or health in any way. It’s about melt-in-your-mouth sweetness.

My recommendation, if you buy it, is to buy the smallest package you can find. If you make it, give most of it away. Quickly.

There are very few things that taste as good.

Someday, when I’ve managed to buy a new candy thermometer and if the humidity around here ever drops below 50% (not that many recipes actually have weather requirements, you know), I am going to try to make some Divinity myself.

I might have to pick up some pecans, but I usually have the other ingredients on hand. Now, some people put candied cherries in their Divinity instead of pecans. You may do this if you like. Just don’t bring it around my house.

Pecan Divinity. That’s the ticket.

Punctuality is. . .

. . .the politeness of princes.*

And something that eludes me when it comes to birthday presents.

This Thursday, I am thankful for nieces and nephews who seem to forgive me even though I never get their birthday presents to them on time.

Honestly, I really don’t know why that is. I must have some deep psychological block, because I am very organized and prompt about other things. It’s not like I forget their birthdays. Often, I think of the birthday a month in advance. I think, Oh! Look! Nephew A’s birthday is next month. I wonder what he would like? Then I do absolutely nothing about it.

As the impending anniversary of Nephew A’s nativity impends a little closer, I think, Golly! Nephew A! I’ve got to get him a present. I think of possibilities. I ponder toys and books and–I don’t know–drum sets (because you never actually have to forgive your siblings for hogging the sofa during The Mary Tyler Moore Show). And I do absolutely nothing about it.

About a week out, I think, I absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt must get that present off to Nephew A.

And. . .I do absolutely nothing about it.

At a certain point, short of FedEx or other overnight delivery options, it’s just too late. It’s not going to get there on time.

At that point, it turns into a phone call. An I’m-sorry-but-your-birthday-present-is-going-to-be-late-please-don’t-hate-me phone call. (And maybe that’s the point? An excuse to talk to those long-distance, too busy with the Wii or the iPod or the iPad or the television kids?)

I don’t know.

I’ll try to do better, although I’ve been saying that for years.

Meantime, I’m really thankful they don’t hate me.

* Louis XVIII

Healthy discontent. . .

. . .is the prelude to progress. *

Last week–was it only last week?–I posted about some of the organizational tools I have used to try to keep up with my Hydra-Headed To Do list. At that point, I suggested somebody remind me to talk about the progress bars I used recently with a group of friends. Well, y’all fell down on the job, and nobody reminded me, but I’m going to talk about them anyway! So there.

You know what I mean when I say, “progress bar,” don’t you?

Every time you load some software, you see one. If you’ve ever participated in a school fundraising drive, you’ve seen one. (That thermometer that rises as the money rolls in? That’s what I mean.)

Back in November, for about 3 months, I made the most incredible progress on a variety of fronts because of some progress bars.

I had a few tasks that could be quantified–like editing a certain number of pages, writing a couple of chapters of my upcoming book, accomplishing 12 tasks of tax preparation. Things like that.

I found some nifty HTML code that allowed me to create a progress bar, and then I noodled with it and changed the colors and added glittering animated gifs when the bar reached 100%.

They looked something like this, with a countdown timer to display how much time before the end of the month, and some progress bars to show how close I was getting to meeting the goals. (Please note: Any resemblance to any actual goals, living or dead, is purely coincidental.)

This is not a perfect implementation of this idea. For one thing, I have to manually calculate the percentage of progress as I go along and edit the page. But as a beginning pass at it, it was a whiz-bang!

Why was it a whiz-bang?

Because it was incredibly effective!

Stuff like editing, which I hate? I sailed through it. I’d do a couple of pages, and instead of quitting, I’d think, If I do a few more, I get to move the bar along a little more! And I’d keep going!

At one point, I had ten or fifteen progress bars going, and I was just watching those colors move farther and farther right and those glittery butterflies flutter. It was a game. Much more fun than checking things off or crossing them out.

If you’d like to add a similar progress bar to your own website, you can find a code generator here. If you prefer a vertical, fundraising thermometer-type thing, this might be a good jumping off point.

If you’re technically-challenged, there are always paper and stickers and crayons. The point is. . .a visual representation of your progress, interactive in some way, even if it’s just gold stars, can make a huge difference!

* Mahatma Gandhi

The Sound of Silence

…isn’t really so silent

This morning, I happened to wake up around 5 am. Unable to get back to sleep, for some reason, I got up to do my morning pages and read for a little while. (I’m reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. This fact has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of this post.)

Just as I was about to fall asleep again–because the new revelations, while actually quite fascinating, are not spell-binding (okay, so it has a little to do with the rest of this post)–I heard a heron.

Have you ever heard a heron?

It sounds like the worst violin lesson ever. (I should know. Once upon a time, I took violin lessons.) It sounds like Harpo Marx’s horn. It sounds like–well, not unlike–a donkey braying.

I thought to myself, This is the silence I moved 1000 miles to get. This caw. These croaks. These cicada songs and squirrel chirrings.

And then I thought to myself, It’s a miracle.

Because this is exactly the silence I moved 1000 miles to get. Even the distant traffic, the occasional shotgun blasts, the boat motors, pump motors, a/c motors–all of those are infinitely preferable to the shell shock of living beneath an undisciplined toddler.

The difference is I was awake by the time I heard the heron honk. It wouldn’t have startled me out of a sound sleep with a bang, a thud and the earthquake rattle of the walls. The battle fatigue of those days has abated.

I can wake up when I set my alarm clock. I can write this blog post in peace. I can anticipate an owl’s hoot or a heron’s honk instead of strain to block out the shake, rattle and roll.

I shouldn’t have had to move 1000 miles to get a few minutes of silence, but the miracle is –it worked.

Hope for Humanity – Pt. 2

Small steps, big changes.

I follow Shaun Usher’s blog, Letters of Note, where a fascinating letter is posted every day. Sometimes, the letter was written by someone famous. Sometimes, it is by someone for whom this posting of the letter is all the fame he or she will ever get. (The former slave writing to his master is one such.)

The hope for humanity to which I am referring does not lie in these letters.

It lies in Shaun. Or, Mr. Usher, I should say. (I am, by the skin of my teeth, of a generation that was taught a certain formality toward people one does not know, in spite of uneasy, although often delighted, co-existence with a less stately present. And don’t get me started wondering why I’ve somehow begun identifying myself as “of a generation.” I think it may be the beginning of the end!)

At any rate, I have a little extra hope for humanity today because Mr. Usher, last Wednesday, wrote a letter of his own to all his readers. In it, he noted that he had concluded that too few of the letters on his website were written by women. He had decided to “redress the balance” and was asking for recommendations. (He has since noted that he’s been inundated with letters as a result, so please don’t rush off and send him more. Yet. Let’s wait until he asks.)

This, to me, is a remarkable occurrence.

I’m a member of 50/50 in 2020 and the Women’s Initiative. I was involved in the mid-80’s with the Women’s Project. These are all organizations that seek to draw attention to an enormous inequality in the theatre industry in terms of opportunities for women. One of the biggest hurdles they all face is in having the current lack of gender parity even recognized. Data is difficult to gather, often ignored or explained away by factors having little to do with gender. As a result, more than half the world’s stories remain untold.

To have someone announce that he has come to the conclusion that he is only telling part of the story and intends to change that is, as I said, a remarkable occurrence.

It’s especially amazing if he came to that realization all on his own without nudging of wife, sister, mother, girlfriend, etc.

Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. And I don’t suppose it really matters. He has the power to take some action, and he’s taking it.

The two days immediately following this announcement and request featured wonderful letters by Clementine Churchill and the incomparable Katharine Hepburn. (There’s even a film clip of Hepburn reading her letter to Spencer Tracy.)

I look forward to all the days to come. In the meantime, here’s a letter:

Dear Mr. Usher,

Thank you!

Elaine

Not of much note–but definitely sincere!

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants

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