A place for language, poetry, domesticity, and the Ice
Today I was Document Girl. Not a well-known super hero, but one who might appear on a late night show, like Saturday Night Live. She goes into the fourth dimension of documents to make sure they all reflect the facts in the same way. She does not wear a cape, but on long days, wears [...]
Things that are required for day 4 of building a fence:
1. A good neighbor who couldn’t sleep (and who has a strong cordless drill and saw)
2. Children who slept at someone else’s house
3. A level (or two)
4. The cavalry arriving around 9:30 a.m.
5. A nail gun, a table saw, a 13-year-old picket runner, and a [...]
In order to draw a straight line, you need two points. In this case, in order to make a fence straight, you need to tie a string and ensure all your posts line up with the string. So: put the post in the hole. Put the level on the post. Shimmy the post around as [...]
The plan for this was a three-parter, with the third part being a lot shorter than the others. Instead, there were… alterations to our plan today. As much as it’s human nature to attempt to plan for the unexpected, especially when it involves things that have been buried under the earth for many years, it [...]
“Good fences make good neighbors.” A friend said this to me recently about a dispute with a disgruntled, tree-hating neighbor. The ironic thing is that we are replacing a portion of our fence this long weekend. The fence was on its last legs, literally; some of the posts had snapped during a series of wind [...]
Today, 8 years ago, I married a great man, who continues to amaze me with his kindness, generosity, understanding, and love. He knows how to help me when I’m down, how to leave me alone when I need to be alone, how to force me into “me” time, how to turn me on, how to [...]
I am very glad for being back to my old job. It’s like putting your old shoes on–you like your new shoes, even though they hurt your feet a lot (shiny and new is cool, but in the end how you feel is what’s more important). But the old shoes elicit a feeling of comfort, [...]
Back when I worked for an investment firm in downtown Boston, I loved shoes. I loved them because I could buy them and put them in a drawer in my desk, and wear them for 8 hours a day. They were 2 inches, 3 inches, and these wonderful white ones that were almost 4 inches. [...]
Jim Allspaw. Lt. Col. in the Army Signal Corps, engineer at GE, founder of Allspaw Consulting Services. He wrote poems to my mother before and after they were married. He drew a portrait of her in Africa. He built us a house in the woods, on a dirt road, and he built me a dollhouse. [...]
In Finding Nemo, when Darla (the “fish killer”) comes into the dentist’s office and begins banging on the glass of the fish tank, Peach says, “Find a happy place, findahappyplace, FINDAHAPPYPLACE!” I’ve been trying to figure out how to find my happy place again. I’ve written about this before (see posts), but find it increasingly, [...]
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