Bite the Bullet

I’ve done it:  I’ve joined National Novel Writing Month. =:0    This evil suggestion came to me from Elizabeth, over at The Garden Window, who is also dipping into the world of temporary insanity known as novel-writing.  In this case, it may lead to permanent insanity, since the idea is to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days.  Are we nuts, or what?!

The only good thing to say about it is that you don’t have to complete the Magnum Opus — that’s just the goal.  The real objective is to get you off your duff and start writing, and I must say that for me, it’s actually been a gift — I’ve entered text that was written but not typed, and am almost at the point where I can add new material that I’ve been kicking around for at least a year.  You are supposed to start the novel on November 1, but I wrote to the contest organizers and explained that new material would require background that I had already written, and could I pleasepleaseplease use that material, if I wrote 50,000 new words?  And they agreed.  So for me, the objective will be to put in 65,000 words total, since the old material I had on hand comes to 15,000 words.

It is a revision of the third novel in my series, Unorthodox Truths.  Those who read that first draft will doubtless be relieved to know that nearly all of it was scrapped, except for the very beginning, and the ideas I’ve been struggling to put on paper are much more realistic.  Really:  How does a man react when he learns that his wife has betrayed everything he holds dear?  I don’t know either.  Probably a mixture of rage and grief.  I do know that I want this to be a supremely Orthodox novel, so repentance and forgiveness are huge themes.

It will also doubtless tick off nearly everybody I know.  I mean, the hero — the good guy — works for the KGB, for crying out loud.  There are no good guys in the KGB, right?  (That’s why they call it fiction.)  My heroine is a former FBI agent who betrays both her country (by marrying a KGB officer) and her husband (by not telling him about a serious breach of security), despite being a rabid conservative — OK, how do you put together a conservative with living in the Soviet Union?!  As I said, it will tick off nearly everybody.  Oh, and the best part:  Both my heroine and my KGB officer are (or become) Orthodox Christians.  Which will mightily annoy the Marxism-is-wonderful crowd, if this book ever actually gets published.

Feels great to be writing again!

R Word, Part 2

A couple of people have written to me privately, asking for updates on the Big Life Shift.  I hadn’t realized it was so long since I’d posted, so an update is long overdue.

Now that we’re over the first shock — it’s actually not so bad.  The day after I wrote that gloomy assessment, I mentioned to my husband that I would need to order another skein of yarn so I could finish my head scarf for church.  ”Where’s the yarn shop?” he asked.  ”Center Harbor.”  ”Great, let’s have lunch there!”  And next thing I knew, we were driving the 50 miles up to Center Harbor, a tiny village on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee — about half the drive takes place along the shoreline of the lake, and at this time of year, of course it was gorgeous.  I bought my yarn, we found a cute lunch place (closed for the season now, unfortunately), and had a Date.  You’d think we’d have been able to have a lot more Dates with the kids grown and gone, but his working conditions — getting up at 2:45 am, leaving at 4:30 am, and not getting home till 7:00 pm — precluded all but household chores.  Now there’s time for Being.

On the advice of our priest, he let a full week go by before beginning another job search (I think Father had more like a month in mind), and the first person he wrote to for a reference — an old professional acquaintance —  said, “Send me your resume.”  Turns out he works for an OSHA training institute, and they’re looking!  So Jim’s been spending the last few weeks updating and honing his resume, which sounds a little obscene, in this economy (our son, for example, still doesn’t have a job).

He gets up, as he said, “at the same time I would have been walking in to work”; makes coffee and breakfast; then settles down to work at the computer for a couple of hours.   Then he takes a break, either with household chores (our back door has finally been painted, after 15 years) or by going for a long run around the neighborhood.  He does all the grocery shopping and a good bit of the cleaning, and I don’t have to tell you all how I feel about that.    :D    (A side benefit:  Due to his background in public health, he actually knows how to clean better than I do.)  But I really appreciate his shopping for dinner; he’s a good bargain hunter, but so far, he’s also picked out better cuts of meat than I’ve been able to find lately.  Must come from having enough time on his hands to do it.

So…we’re shaking down with it.  I never thought there could be life after retirement, but I guess there is!

The “R” Word

Retirement.

As many of you already know, my husband’s last day on the job was yesterday, and he is the first to admit that it was tough.  I know that there are people who actively look forward to their retirement, so they can golf all day, or fish all day, or enjoy the grandchildren; we are not among them.  My husband is too active a man to enjoy reading all day, or working crosswords all day (his two main hobbies), and the grandchildren are now in South Carolina.

At least we are spared economic privation (for the time being).  Largely thanks to Ronald Reagan, Americans think that civil servants live in the lap of luxury.  That is only the case for members of Congress and very high Administration officials; the rest of us live very similarly to the rest of our communities.  The big difference is that, up till sometime in the 1970s, civil servants were ineligible for Social Security, and instead were covered by the Civil Service Retirement System, under which you accrued a certain percentage of your base salary for every year you worked.  If you left civil service at age 55, you were eligible for half of your “high three” (the average of the three highest salaries you’d earned in the period), and you accrued 2% per year after that, for a maximum of 80% of your “high three.”  Yes, it’s generous; it was meant to make up for the fact that civil servants often earned salaries much lower than their civilian counterparts.

In the 1970s, the system was changed for employees entering civil service, but people who had come on under the CSRS could opt to remain with it.  Under the new Federal Employees Retirement System, the benefits were not as good, but federal employees were eligible for Social Security.  We took a hard look at our options, and decided to stay with CSRS.  Now I’m glad we did.

But there’s such an emotional wrench to retirement.  When you are well loved, as my husband has been, people are genuinely sorry to see you go, and there’s an element of feeling as if you are abandoning people who need you.  Yet, many people assured my husband that they would not be far behind him; civil service has changed so much that people are leaving in droves.  Think that’s a good thing?  They are being replaced by people who can’t spell, can’t do accurate arithmetic even with a calculator, and have no work ethic at all.  Those idiots who shut down the federal government in 1995, then boasted that “everything worked just fine,” should have given it another three months — we’d still be picking up the pieces.

Yes, I’m hurting.  It hurts to think that someone who cared so much, and was so appreciated by the people he helped, was so little valued by his supervisors.  It hurts to see someone with so much left to give, unable to give it.  It hurts to think of him on the shelf.

Don’t let anyone kid you.  Retirement sucks.

Softening of Evil Hearts

This is the icon of the Theotokos that I saw and venerated today at Divine Liturgy.  I can’t describe the experience, except that when She arrived at the church, Her arrival was heralded by bells; and as the priest of the parish brought her in, there were many damp eyes, mine among them.

I don’t know what it is about this icon.  I don’t normally care for Western-style iconography, but Her expression is so inexpressibly sweet, and the sight of all those swords piercing her heart…  And then there’s the Troparion, in Tone 5:

Soften our evil hearts, O Theotokos, * and quench the attacks of those who hate us * and loose all straitness of our soul. * For looking on thy holy image * we are filled with compunction by thy suffering and loving-kindness for us * and we kiss thy wounds; * we are filled with horror for the darts with which we wound thee. * Let us not, O Mother of Compassion, * according to the cruelty of our hearts, perish from the cruelty of heart of those near us, ** For thou art in truth the Softener of Evil Hearts.

How could you resist this?!

I was disappointed to find that there were no paper icons available for purchase, nor any of the oil, though I was anointed with the myrrh that exudes from this icon, and have the cotton ball with which I wiped it off my forehead.  I’m hoping to bring it to the priest who chrismated me, and who is very ill.

Meanwhile, prayers for my husband would be appreciated:  He’s retiring from 40 years of civil service, and as he just said, “I feel like I’m losing my identity.”  I can imagine.

The History of Aprons

Received this from a friend today, and as I know at least one reader who is “into” aprons, I thought she’d appreciate this.  (But I hope you all do.)

I don’t think our kids know what an apron is.

The principal use of Grandma’s apron was to protect the dress underneath, because she only had a few, it was easier to wash aprons than dresses and they used less material, but along with that, it served as a potholder for removing hot pans from the oven.

It was wonderful for drying children’s tears, and on occasion was even used for cleaning out dirty ears.

From the chicken coop, the apron was used for carrying eggs, fussy chicks, and sometimes half-hatched eggs to be finished in the warming oven.

When company came, those aprons were ideal hiding places for shy kids.

And when the weather was cold, grandma wrapped it around her arms.

Those big old aprons wiped many a perspiring brow, bent over the hot wood stove.

Chips and kindling wood were brought into the kitchen in that apron.

From the garden, it carried all sorts of vegetables.  After the peas had been shelled, it carried out the hulls.

In the fall, the apron was used to bring in apples that had fallen from the trees.

When unexpected company drove up the road, it was surprising how much furniture that old apron could dust in a matter of seconds.

When dinner was ready, Grandma walked out onto the porch, waved her apron, and the men knew it was time to come in from the fields to dinner.

It will be a long time before someone invents something that will replace that ‘old-time apron’ that served so many purposes.

They would go crazy now trying to figure out how many germs were on that apron.

I don’t think I ever caught anything from an apron,except maybe a little love and caring.

Ya Win Some, Ya Lose Some

My sister’s daughter was married yesterday.  There is no way to describe what a beautiful wedding it was, in a beautiful setting — well, I felt bad that they chose to hold the ceremony at a country club, but the garden where it was held had a little gazebo, and overlooked the golf course lake.  The weather was what made the setting so striking — it was a cloudless day, brilliant sunshine, a bit chilly (around 60 degrees), and since the wedding took place at 5:30 in the evening, the golden autumn glow was in full force, and backlit everything, making it seem tranquil, serene — fill in your own favorite adjective.  I said I couldn’t describe it.        But it was almost like God’s blessing on the couple.

The bride’s grandfather, an ordained minister in the Southern Baptist Convention, performed the ceremony, and there were about a hundred guests — all of them either immediate family, or friends of the bride and groom.  Afterwards we all went into the country club and had a very tasty dinner of either chicken or prime rib (we had a choice).  The DJ was too loud — why do all DJs insist on breaking people’s eardrums?! — so the hubster and I left early, but otherwise, we had a great time.

My stepfather was there, which was a relief.  His health has been iffy these past several months, and there was a point where we thought he might check out just a couple of weeks before the wedding; but he has been a part of this girl’s life every single day of it until she left home for college, so not having him there would have put a big pall on her wedding.  He did look confused and out of it, and left early.

I did get to catch up with my brother who lives in Florida, and as always he had us rocking with laughter with his wisecracks — I won’t go into them as they were of a fairly risque nature, but they were directed at my sister, with whom he has always been particularly close, and she was almost on the floor laughing, so no offense intended and none taken.  The hard part for me was the brother who got offended at comments I made about him on this blog; when I asked, “You talking to me?” he said, “No.”  OK, well, what are you gonna do?  Then he added, “Not unless an apology is involved.”  And I said, “For what?”  And he didn’t answer.

And that was that. I mean, he already got an apology for the comments I made; what more does he want?  He seemed to think I had referred to him as a “complete jerk” because he was defending Dad’s wish to return home, but that wasn’t it at all.  My sister had a hard choice to make at the time; she made it with a lot of agonizing, and needed family support.  And she wasn’t getting it from this one brother.  To be fair, he did note that he had volunteered to spend every other weekend with Dad, something I was unaware of at the time.  But that wasn’t awfully helpful the rest of the time,  when my sister and I would have been his sole caregivers, and Dad needed (and still needs) 24-hour care.

It’s pretty silly at this point, too, because my brother seems to have realized that Dad really does need to be in a facility — I mean, he confuses my brothers with his brothers, and my sister with his sister, and is wheelchair-bound — so what’s the issue?  For me, this was the only damper on the day, but as I said, I’ve already given an apology, so — what else is there to apologize for??

Bleah.

Photos of My Porch

I’m not sure how many I can download at once, but I will do my best.

This is the Wall of Books, under the porch windows:

And here is the Ugly Blue Rug that “graced” our porch floor for 23 years (!):

Yes, it’s a mess, but you did ask.  We’ve been digging away at the mess for the past two weeks, and the Ugly Blue Rug is gone now.

Here’s our new reading nook:

It actually looks a little different now — the bookcase has been moved to the Wall of Books, and I have a larger, though unfinished, bookcase next to my rocking chair now.  I love my “mail depot,” by the way!  PS:  The Morris chair is a genuine antique that has been in Jim’s family for literally a hundred years.

And the “Breakfast Area,” where we have been consuming all our meals for the past two weeks:

Lastly, though it’s not on the porch, I couldn’t resist adding my icon corner from the living room:

The area where the Ugly Blue Rug was has been substantially cleaned, and I hope to get photos of it up before long; but I’m hearing rumbles of thunder, and am not inclined to take any risks with this computer.  It’s new, and cost too darn much.

(OK, I did try to get the captions next to the photos, but that’s not working, so just read down, and I hope it’s clear.  Obviously, there are limits to WordPress.)

Reedie, Huh?

Most people who read this blog regularly know that I am addicted to Blog Things, which I get through my now-defunct blog at Xanga (I can’t remember my password anymore).  Today’s was an eye-opener:

You Are Reed

You love learning for its own sake, even more the most people. You believe that education is all about the experience… not about the degree. You prefer to go to an institution with other serious students and accessible professors. You rather be with people who are truly interested in ideas, not in showing how smart they are.

Not because I’m not like this, but because until today, I’d never heard of Reed College.  Now, before I annoy my lone Pacific Northwest reader no end, I should note that this is not East-Coast snobbery — more like working-class cluelessness.  In my background, people had as much chance of going to Harvard as of going to the moon (actually, going to the moon was probably more likely, especially if you were a devotee of The Honeymooners, with Jackie Gleason).

So it seems I am a “Reedie” at heart.  I looked up this college on Wikipedia, and at first I was enthralled — you mean there’s actually a college that doesn’t stress sports over academics?! — but as I read, I wondered if I would be such a good fit after all:  apparently, Reed has always been something of a radical-left campus.  (No, it wasn’t named after the John Reed in Reds, though probably many people think so.)

That’s disturbing because, thanks to the aforementioned working-class background, I have always thought of myself as a conservative.  Of late, I’m willing to admit to being a “crunchy con,” the phrase coined by Rod Dreher, who wrote a whole book about it; but the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that what I actually am is a socialist conservative.  I actually do support publicly-funded healthcare, in principle, anyway, though practically, I don’t see it working in the US.  (I did see it working, and very well, in Germany.)  I’m fairly pro-life; capital punishment gives me the heebie-jeebies, though there are some instances where I think it’s probably a kindness to all concerned — imagine being a prison guard and having to live with the likes of Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer.  I don’t have a problem with capitalism in general, but Reaganomics sends me into the stratosphere — the current economic crisis can be traced directly to the loosening of socially-responsible mandates placed on business back in the 1930s.  And of course, I am fanatically conservative when it comes to the preservation of the traditional family, and on that subject I have no qualifiers.

So I’m not sure I would have fit in at Reed.  But it’s nice to know that there is one college in this world that does uphold stringent academic standards — left-wing though they may be.

Oh. My. Word.

In my last post, I made a few references to a certain contractor who had done a bang-up job on our then-new kitchen, and a little bit down, noted that I needed to look into laminate flooring for our renovated porch.  What I didn’t say was that the same contractor is doing the porch job, too.

The guy is our next-door neighbor, and has done more work on this house than anybody has for, I suspect, all the house’s 55 years of existence.  Our first clue that we were on to something good was when we hired him to redo our bathroom, and we loved the job he did.  So we had him back to do the kitchen, and we really loved that job.  Last September, we had him redo our back steps; for 22 years, we had been living with three stone steps that went up to a stone landing — no handrails — and as we grew older, that was getting a bit too hazardous for comfort.  (I slipped more than once on icy steps.)  So he bought composite decking and vinyl railings, and now we have not only steps of a comfortable height, but a lovely little porch and deck on the back of the house.

We thought that would do it for awhile, until he asked in April if we needed anything else done — he hadn’t worked since Christmas.  Ouch.  Well, as it happened, the front steps were also stone, and we’d figured we’d have them done in another year or two — now’s as good a time as any, since he needed work.

The front steps morphed into a nice little roof over the steps, and a new front door.  I talked the hubster into a mail slot, so now our mail is delivered right onto our porch, and nobody can get their hands on it — what I hadn’t expected was that our neighbor/contractor would build a little collection box, stained to match the paneling on the porch. Then we decided to have the porch windows replaced.  (It’s always been an enclosed porch.)  Good thing we did:  It turned out that the old windows hadn’t been caulked properly, and all the wood on the front of the porch had gotten wet and rotted, so that all had to be replaced — which necessitated ripping out part of the paneling from the inside of the porch.  The guy replaced it all with brand-new paneling that he proceeded to stain so that it looks just like the stuff that’s been there for 55 years. I’m telling you, he’s good!

We almost decided not to have the last phase of the porch done — ripping up an ugly blue shag rug — since we didn’t know how much that unexpected little side trip was going to cost.  Then he submitted a revised estimate that was only a little bit extra, and included putting down laminate flooring on the porch.  Considering that the flooring was included, we said, “Go for it!”  And yesterday, he slotted in the last board.

I have to say, I wish I had thought to take before-and-after photos.  You would not believe the difference.  There’s still a lot of clutter that we have to wade through to get it looking liveable — over the past five years, we just kept storing stuff out there, since we couldn’t use the porch for the first two years (road work outside our front door), and I was incapable of any heavy work for the three years after that — but I stand in awe of this man.  From having a non-descript 950-square-foot little house, we have gone to owning a cute little bungalow with almost an extra room added, but no extra square footage — that porch will serve us very nicely as a room for three seasons out of four.  We have a beautiful light in the portico that does a great job of lighting the steps  — the lamps had originally been located inside the porch — what rocket scientist thought of that?! — and an almost clean and airy space in which to read or cross stitch or just watch the passing scene.  Once we clear out the boxes of books and extra paraphernalia that have accumulated, it’s going to be almost heaven!

Mimi’s Meme

Can…not…resist…Must…do…Resistance…Is…Futile…

5 things I was doing five years ago:

Trying to get used to the idea that my son had moved away from home
Working on an analoy cover for church
Trying to get used to the idea that I was actually a grandmother
Anticipating a new daughter-in-law (the less said about that, the better)
Having my kitchen redone, which was not nearly as bad as it should have been, mostly because my contractor hooked up the stove and sink every night so we could use them — I hope God has a special place in heaven for him

5 things on my to do list:
Talk to my priest about Jordanville (he was out of town last week)
Cross stitch (always, always)
Update diary
Pay parking ticket   
Find laminate flooring at Lowe’s for my porch

5 things I would do with a million dollars:

Pay off the home-equity loan that we used to have our front porch redone
Establish a perpetual trust fund for my church
Buy a vacation home in Germany so I could park dh there while I visit Russia
Hire a full-time maid
Install a floor to ceiling bookcase in the living room…and in each bedroom…and in the basement…and then I’d open the Gonic branch of the Rochester Public Library.  Heck, we have enough books to do it, anyway.

5 places I have lived:
New York, New York (well, Queens, actually, but it is part of NY)
Moerfelden-Walldorf, Germany

Morgantown, WV (ye gods and little fishes)
Greater Boston, MA

Gonic, NH

5 things I want to be doing in 5 years:

Being alive would be nice (I’m at the point where I read the obits every morning to make sure I’m not in there)
Still stitching
Teaching Typicon to members of my parish
Being part of a start-up Russian parish in Seacoast NH
Enjoying my finally tidy house, which at this moment is alive and well in Fantasyland

Thanks, Mimi!