Blogiversary

How could I let the month of October pass without a comment that it's my second blogiversary! I've actually stuck with this thing (more or less) for two years! [checks posting schedule] Nope--missed March 06 and December 05. That's what happens when you refuse to do quiz results just for the sake of another post.

And that brings me 'round to the subject of this post. I've been slooooowly realizing that you can do a thing, or you can do a thing online, but you can't do both. Not really.

And now for the context around that statement. I knit, I art (note the small "a" in that), I write. I belong to many many many Yahoo groups about knitting and mail art and journaling and stuff.

And I see that a lot of the people blogs I had links to have faded away. The folks who got me going on Blogger have folded up shop, other people whose prose I admired have stopped posting, and a few folks that I recently collected onto my roll have posted saying that they had realized it was ride their hobbyhorse, or blog about every moment mounted.

And I have a few folks whom I read every time I get a minute, though I don't blogroll them, people whose blogs have formed the basis for books and such, and I no longer feel connected with them the way I did three years ago when I started reading blogs.

And on the lists, list moms have commented that the LIST is eating up the time that they used to use to make the subject of the list, and while it's nice that the list was much beloved and enjoyed, it's time to close up shop and get back to their lives.

And I find that more and more, I'm starting to feel that I'm writing about what I do more than I'm actually doing. I feel that I post here when I have good news to share (although as mentioned before, if I don't share all the bad news because I don't want the outpouring of sympathy [or worse yet, the casual, "Sucks to be you! Hope things get better; loveyabye."]then I certainly can't expect to share good news and have others understand why it's good news.) but I don't share my whole life--or even a whole part of any of my life. (Shocking, isn't it? I don't even share all my knitting with my Tonstant Weaders.)

And it takes time to produce this stuff. It takes time to come up with the subject, land fingies on the keys, set up photos, crop and fix the photos, and then put it all together for consumption.

So I really dig where folks are coming from when they say, "I'm getting off this merry-go-round; I'm going to go and explore my ideas, meet my muse at the board and DO a bunch of these things that I've been thinking about and exposed to, so I'll have the object in my hand rather than another blogpost that will be read and discarded like any other article from the newspaper."

Will there be a year three? Or will we close the Lunchbox and eat out instead?

Another Li'l Lunchbox

Sorry I haven't been around lately. I've blogged before about how transparency flies out the window when people you know in real life read your blog, so re-read thiose rants for a pithy explanation. What's been going on is stuff I wouldn't share with First Consort Gareth--except, well, he lives here, so he's privy to quite a lot that happens that I don't necessarily want to talk about.

And when it's stuff you don't want to share, you either pull up stuff on BlogThings just so you can get a post in edgewise, or you sit in the corner with your thumb in your mouth.

Or, in yours truly's case, you knit. Knit on, with confidence and courage, etc., etc.

Do enough of that and you get another li'l lunchbox off the needles and out into the world.



This one is based on a scrap quilt layout called Roman Coins. I'm happy with it; it's a nice little stash buster. I think I'll make it bigger next time, like 40" by 60", this is more like 40" by 40".

It's almost time to close this down for Hallowthankmas. (I know, I know, you couldn't tell that this WASN'T closed down from the frequency of the posts. Rant on that coming up soon.)

While Strolling on the Banks

Today tastes like the chocolate Coca-Cola cake my mother would make for birthdays if you begged specially. The old formula Coke, not the "classic formula" they came out with after the fiasco of new Coke. It's not the same, I've tried the recipie on my own, in nostalgic moments when I can conveniently forget that the recipe calls for three sticks of butter, and a cup of sugar on top of the half-sack of minature marshmallows, AND the Coke, AND the box of confectioner's sugar. Oh, did I forget the two cups of pecans?

Yup, it's a recipe out of Hell's Kitchen--nothing but sugar and fat. No redeeming virtues at all. But ever so yummy--carmelized sugar and chocolate in one gooey masterpiece, ready to go right out of the oven.

Did I mention it freezes well and microwaves beautifully? That would be why I'm out in the morning, walking for an hour before I go to the gym for my workout.

It may be spring when the swallows come back to Capistrano, but it's fall when the waterfowl come back to Phoenix. One hears that irrigation canals criss-cross the city, which made it possible to farm a water-hungry crop like citrus, and still nourish lawns and golf courses so people who move here from greener pastures to get away from winters and allergies can recreate what they left behind--moaning about the unbearable humidity and thier everlasting allergies.

But it's one thing to see photos, and another to live in a city that was laid out by Bradbury's golden-eyed Martians. Raised canals cut gouges through farmland turned suburbia, with parks and fields lying low beside them. In summer, when the monsoons have been niggardly with their moisture, the fields are irrigated--flooded--with water drawn from the canals, grass swaying under three inches of water soaking into the soil.

And having water available brings its own little ecosystem. In the winter, its common to see ducks going about their business on the canals, finding places under bridges where the current's surface flow eddies, dabbling after weeds that found cracks in the cement liner to grow, flapping out onto the banks to go to work on some grass humans planted in a backyard poking under the fence, or in a park.

So the school by my house had irrigated the soccer field over the weekend, and a little pond lay in the lowest spots. The ducks, bless their little webfooted hearts, had noticed water and grass--which meant that there must be worms and other good things. They were paddling about on the pond, oblivious to the skeletal goalposts and backstop sprouting from the surface like Excalibur.