Tales from the Shark Tank

Tornado is learning about being an outdoor kitty.  Not that she goes out at night; even with protective coloration, I don’t trust her to avoid coyotes and the like.  But the past couple of days, she has discovered Trees.  After the day she panicked and ran halfway up a maple before she realized she could, she’s been testing this new found skill.  So far she’s very good at “up”, but not so skilled at “down”.  She mews, and tries, but hasn’t thought to back down.  You can see what she’s thinking.  “Mom?  These things on my toes got me up here, but now they’re curved the wrong way.”

Yesterday our boychick sounded the alarm as he was waiting for the bus.  He went on his way to school quite worried about his kitten, but within about 5 minutes I’d gotten a 2-step stool.  Thus raised, she could jump from branch to shoulder without problem, and thence to the ground.  She probably could have done it in one leap, but she was cautious.  Today, though, she went far higher, then jumped down…onto the roof.  So she couldn’t get back into the tree, and she couldn’t get herself down.  She kept going around the house, mewing and peering over edges.  Finally I went up the step-ladder and called her, and bless her little furry heart, she came right up to the edge.  There was a slight panic because I had to lift her from an odd angle before I could get a hand fully under her, but she didn’t really try to claw me, and once folded into my arms and against my chest (and under my cloak) she settled down.  That was a good thing; I really did prefer at least one hand for getting down that ladder.

So there it is.  I’ve rescued kittens and small children from trees and similar high places since my teens, and here I am, at it again.  At least this time I didn’t climb the tree itself after the small adventurer.  But y’know?  When I’m a bit lighter, it might be fun to try that again too.

I have a long standing and well deserved reputation for wearing interesting colors. I also have a reputation of equally long standing, even better deserved, for pack-rat-itis. Both are inherited, but I digress.

Back when I was in college, there was a mill-end fabric store in Franklin, Indiana which was much beloved of us SCAdian types. Fascinating fabrics of unusual or historically inspired prints, velvets and wools, all to be had at ridiculously reasonable prices, what’s not to like? On one pilgrimage, one of the other women found some rasberry pink bonded wool and called us over to see the example of fabric which was on sale for fifty cents a yard for a reason. To her horror, I grabbed the bolt and had it measured, then bought the whole five yards available. We took it home, and no more was said.

The winter holiday party was about six weeks later. I had a package from the woman in question, which turned out to be a length of white fur trim. On the card she had written “To the only person I know who would wear this color… and get away with it. You Know Who You Are!”

Oh, the fabric? I made a jumper I can wear either as garb or for everyday and a work-appropriate blazer out of it. And the reason I thought of the story is that I can fit into them again.  And besides, I just found the white fur trim.

My kitten has developed into the equivalent of a human toddler, complete with escape-games.  Her latest trick involves listening for human activity by the doors.  When an outside door opens, even if she was two rooms away when hand touched door, she makes a great leap for freedom, eluding both her mother’s blockading body and the ponderous (and usually full-handed) human whose opposable thumbs make door-opening possible.  Usually I can drop whatever I’m holding and catch her before she’s gone too far, as she will find a fascinating insect within five feet and examine it so closely that she’s unaware of my approach until her feet leave the ground under the impetus of my hands under her body.  Then, of course, she turns around and snuggles against my chest, purring at top volume, as if she had planned all along to be caught and carried back.

Today, though, it backfired on her a little.  She executed her leap-and-escape, bounding around the end of the house.  There was tree directly along her trajectory, which she failed to notice, running up it to about human head height.  There she stopped.  With claws firmly sunk into the bark, she looked around, and her eyes got very wide.  You could almost see the thoughts running through her head.  “Wait…when did running turn into climbing?  And how did I get up this high without jumping?  And…and…where’s Mama?“  The vocalized result was a single squeaky “mew“, as she dropped to the ground and ran at top speed for the same door out of which she had escaped.

Which was closed.  So she dove into the hostas growing beside it, vanishing entirely.  But I had seen where she went, and reached in to separate leaves until a black kitten head with enormous green eyes peered out at me from the jungle.  She leapt into my reaching hands, and out of them again as soon as I had the door open, to race to her mama.  There ensued much feline conversation, licking, and ultimately purring.  Once baby was calm, Sophia looked up at me, slowly closing and opening her eyes.  “You make a lap for yours” she told me.  “You should try licking him when he’s upset.  It really does work wonders.”

There is a fairly new system now, for arranging for kids to work on reading at their own level.  Books are rated on a numeric scale, and kids tested to determine their current reading level.  Overall, I like the concept; it means among other things that a third grader who is reading at a higher level won’t be stuck bored with third grade material.  But the way it’s implemented doesn’t altogether make sense.

Once a child’s score/ level is determined, they can read books in a 100 point range, up to 50 points either below or above.  More than that below is too easy, so that they won’t be learning enough from it.  I have no problem with that overall, though as we’re going through the attempt to teach inference and sequencing to our boychick, I may have to challenge it.  But as it stands, easier books don’t count.

But neither do books above that range.  It’s “too hard”.  That makes no sense to me; if the kid wants to read it, can read it, and can understand it, then it wasn’t too hard, and should be permitted.  But as it stands, it isn’t.

I doubt as a practical matter that we’ll run into a problem with that; the book list for the top end of our kid’s range includes Lord of the Rings and LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy, as well as a fair collection of books on the anatomy of volcanoes, earthquakes, tornados and hurricanes.  But I can find no logic in the notion that a child’s efforts should have a ceiling as well as a floor.  All a ceiling can do is get in the way of the wings.

At least, that’s what the old ads to get people to enlist in the Army used to say. I’d have to say the same applies to what has been tagged “combat sewing”.

A few weeks back, having realized that a trip into Indianapolis to go to Court with an old client/ friend was going to coincide with SCA Coronation, I hatched a plan to garb myself and Li in Italian Renaissance dresses so that we and her current housemate (who has his own garb already) could attend. We purchased brocade for our dresses and cotton for chemises, I took measurements (for her, but not myself, which in retrospect I should have done) and with two weeks to complete it, set about the matter.

Life intervened, as usual, and so I didn’t even really get started for a week. But that was ok, I thought, as the type of dress I had in mind is essentially a loose, floor-length vest, which in theory is easy to fit and even easier to construct. Indeed, I expected to spend more time on the chemises, especially since Li had specified that she wanted to look like a “china doll”, and that entails a certain amount of ruffle and detail. So I did the chemises first, cutting both out on a friend’s dining room table and assembling them the following day. They went together without hitch (I did cheat to the extent of using commercial bias tape for casings), and I folded them up, put them aside, and cut out my overdress without further ado or angst, cutting a lining for it at the same time.

I reckoned without the slipperiness of brocade and the changes wrought in my figure over the past nine months. Thinking it complete, I put the dress on to determine where to attach hook and eye, only to find that it was at least 2 sizes too big. So ok, I took out the side seam in the lining and attempted to take the thing in from the sides. Remember that thing about the slickness of brocade? Yeah, that. I succeeded only in making matters worse. Then I ran out of the correct color of thread. It was time to depart, and I hadn’t even begun to pack.

So I folded up the disaster, along with the lining and fabric for Li’s dress, my suit (unworn for at least a year), assorted other necessary things, and blew out of town…only to hit fog en route.  Slowed me down for about 25 miles, then by some quirk of topography settled down into the fields on either side of the road, while leaving the road itself (only marginally higher ground than the fields) clear.  After that I made decent time, but still got in closer to midnight than anything else.  That was ever-so-not according to plan!

So next morning was court, which was its own variety of adventure, as the deputies that run the metal detector had instructions to turn everyone away because no court had any cases docketed….except, of course, the one that did.  You’d think that after the 10th person came saying “I have a hearing this morning in Court 10″ that they might, oh, say - call Court 10 and ask?  But they had not; my sometime law clerk and I had to sort it out ourselves, after essentially bulldozing our way into the building.  Then coffee, then lunch with Li, then back to the house, where I promptly fell over and went to sleep.  Something about the 5 hours I’d gotten the night before…..Long story short, it was 5:00 p.m. before the sewing commenced with a dismantling party in Li’s back yard, as she and I attacked my dress with seam rippers and sewing shears.  See, I’d put it together with a serger, which meant that there was no seam allowance, and that taking it apart was rather like dismantling an Egyptian pyramid.  So when I got to the point of detaching brocade from lining, I decided that a quarter inch of sheer cotton bound into a seam that was going to be enclosed anyway was no problem and just cut the lining away.

Then it was time to reconstruct.  Having brought my own auxiliary sewing machine, I set it up.  Li took the chemises and began adding lace to them, while I put my dress together.  Then she put the binding over the raw edges (cheating again; saved me improvising facings or wrestling further with the lning monster) while I fitted hers (all that scrap lining was good for something!) and cut it out.

And got foxed by the slickness of brocade in combination with my own hurry again.  Nothing like completing a dress to discover that the hem is wildly uneven.  But Li tacked it up while I went to visit my folks, and we regathered for a picnic dinner at Coronation.  I now have Li’s dress awaiting my attention to even the hem; evidently my description of how to accomplish it was either intimidating or lacked the clarity generally ascribed to mud.  It’ll get done shortly, mostly by use of tricks learned in a department store alterations shop.  And then I’ll see if I can’t figure out a better way to handle that darned brocade, because it’s just too pretty to give up on, and because if I can master silk charmeuse (essentially heavy silk satin that takes holes every time it makes the acquaintance of a pin and permanent lines if one draws on it with chalk) then by heaven I refuse to be defeated by the polyesterized remains of a dinosaur!

If the focus of a hunter is prey, then I am being preyed upon, and both cheerful and mind-boggled about it.  I’m being head-hunted.

I had a neighbor in Indianapolis who taught at one of the specialty schools that draws from the entire state.  (Mom, I’ll explain later; I don’t want to name it publicly yet.)  He and his partner moved away almost a year before we did, but before that we talked some.  We were friendly, if not friends, and when I stopped working for the state and started trying to go into grant writing, I told them about it.  I’d forgotten all about it; it was a casual conversation that happened a good two years ago.
I never exactly gave up on the grant-writing, but it did kind of peter out gradually.  Then yesterday morning my cell phone rang.

“Hi, Alisa?  This is D., from the (mrphl) school.”  I’m thinking “I don’t know anyone from there, but clearly he called the number he intended; he knows my name.  What the…?”

“S. said you were going into grant writing.  I know you need to work from home, because you have a son with special needs”  (Ok, I’m thinking, when did I talk to this guy, and why don’t I remember him?  And who is S.?  The name sounds familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”)  “We’re a creature of the State of Indiana, but we get a lot of grant funding as well.  Most of it up until now has been pretty automatic - all schools of our type get it.  But now we’ve got a new superintendant, and he wants us to go after the bigger grants, the private ones.  We had a meeting with the teachers about it, and most of them are very intimidated by the process.  S. suggested that you might well be interested in working with us.  He says that you’re very articulate, and that you explain things well.  Could you put together a resume for me?”

And the penny dropped.  S. was my erstwhile neighbor, who taught at the school.  D. didn’t know me, but S. did, and had evidently told his boss as much as he knew together with his own opinions, which I gather were good.  I picked my jaw up off the floor, and D. and I talked for a good twenty minutes or so.  By the time we signed off, I had agreed to put together a resume that covered both my grant-writing and legal experience, figure out a reasonable rate for my services, either help them create a separate foundation for fund-raising purposes (complicated and a thing I’ve never done, which I told D. up front) or help them find an attorney who would do so and do a good job and then work with that person, and call D. back in a few days.  And oh by the way, we know you’re up in northwest Indiana now, but might you be able to arrange to attend the twice-yearly board meetings?

So that’s my project.  I’m putting together the resume today, along with a writing sample.  I’ll call when it’s done, get D.’s e-mail address to send it to him, and ask him if he wants me to come in to meet in person on Friday afternoon, since I’ll be in Indy Friday morning to go to court with a long-standing client.  And we’ll see where this goes from here.  But I’m feeling fairly confident.  They came looking for me, not the other way around.  I’m not sending a resume they aren’t expecting in hopes they might want to talk to me; it’s been requested.  It’s not in the bag yet, but the bag is being held open.

We tried to acquire broadband again, this time by satellite. My husband made arrangements to acquire a dish, and I was coordinating installation.

We ended up cancelling it, as they found ways to double the price of the project. There’s a small television dish attached to the back of our barn, and we thought that would serve as a location. No such luck. Evidently the dish (which would be ours, purchased, not leased) must be fastened to a concrete or brick wall or a metal - not wooden - pole. I have two light poles on the property, but both are of wood. The installer kept saying “I’m not permitted to mount it on (insert proposed object)”. So he would have to put up a separate steel pole, which he just happened to have on the truck. Or we could have our own pole put up, and then pay a hefty fee for him having to come out a second time, when that would not have been necessary had they given us the parameters in the first place.

In strict fact, we could have had our broadband connection. But the way they were doing business was leaving a really bad taste in both our mouths, so that we didn’t want an ongoing business relationship with them as our isp. So now we’re looking into alternate ways of mounting receivers for wireless broadband. And despite our hopes, we’re still in the Land of Dial-up.

Some years back, I was job hunting and consulted a legal employment agency. The owner, an attorney I knew, interviewed me so she could figure out where to place me. In the course of that, she observed that I could tell her clearly what sort of job I did not want, but that she needed to know what kind of job I did want; what I would enjoy and be happy with, because she’d found that her placements “took” far better if she worked from that basis.

The question stopped me in my tracks. I never did end up working with her, because I could not for the life of me frame an answer in positive terms. I knew what drove me crazy, what I hated, what I would have to surrender my soul to try to do. (That sounds melodramatic, but isn’t meant to be: that’s what it felt like.) I had no idea what I would enjoy doing.

That was nearly 7 years ago. I’ve been through another job, one that I liked for several years but was glad to leave when it ended, if not glad for the terms upon which I left. I’ve been doing a few freelance things since then, but basically have been specializing in motherhood with varying degrees of success. Focus has been lacking, as has organization. And today a friend asked me, again, what I wanted to do. I started to answer, and she stopped me by pointing out that she’d asked me what I want to do, as she put it “What Alisa wants” rather than what I feel obligated to do. I paused, realizing I’d begun my answer with “I need to….”

And once again, the question stopped me cold. I still have no least idea what I want to do. When I think about it, I’ve spent my entire life meeting other people’s expectations and needs. I went to law school because it was expected of me that I go to professional school and that’s the one I got into. I’m good at law, but it’s not a good fit, not really, and I have no idea what would be. I’ve been a good and dutiful granddaughter and daughter and mother.  (”Wife” isn’t in that list only because that’s not a thing that feels like a duty.) And while that’s appropriate to a certain extent, I’ve left so little room in it for myself that when someone asks me what I want to do that is only for myself, even for a day, I have no answer to the question.

I’ve been organizing my sewing room (time and past for that), going through my fabrics, sorting cottons from linens from silks and putting the wools in tight storage tubs with moth crystals.  I prefer herbal moth repellants, but in this house, that’s just not sufficient protection for my best fabrics.

In the course of this process, I’m finding occasional lengths of fabric that memory indicates were purchased by someone else, but I can’t always figure out for whom.  I’ve pegged the burdundy and olive brocades with the white cotton gauze as being for Li, for a dress suited to a china princess doll, and I’ve another bag that is tagged in my memory as Dorothea’s (I just found the patterns, too!)  But there’s a largish length ofa heavy weight burgundy cotton jacquard (twill weight, I’d say), with the woven-in design being of roses.  My memory says it’s something I wanted for myself, but that someone else found and bought the last of and then gave to me to make up.  I thought that someone was Li, but she says not.  So since everyone I sew for reads this…anyone recognize the description?  If it’s mine, great, I’ll be delighted, but I really don’t think it is and don’t want to commit what lawyers call “conversion”.  (My profession can come up with the most arcane terms for the simplest concepts, in this case theft.)

So anyway, if you think the burgundy cotton is yours, please let me know.