Tales from the Shark Tank

Tonight is Halloween, a time for costumes of various sorts.  As always when parents are busy, purchased costumes have been the order of the day for most kids.  Mine, though, has only had a purchased costume once.  When he was 2, he went as a pumpkin.  Others, managed by Mom’s ingenuity (or sometimes desperation), have included Clifford the Big Red Dog, a zombie, Bob the Builder, and a ghost that did not involve a pillowcase.  That one was an ankle-length T-tunic, with the fabric cut loose from the side of the body but not under the arms.  I cut those long hanging strips into ribbons, so that they fluttered when he moved.  But I digress.

This year he declared he wanted to be a storm-chaser.  There was only one problem with that.  Storm chasers wear normal clothes, which do not a costume make.  So I suggested he be the storm, an idea which he took to with great glee and gusto.  We bought a grey sweatshirt and sweatpants and half a dozen colors of fabric paint, and he and mom went to work.  I painted tornadoes front and back in dark grey and iridescent purple, complete with debris clouds, because it isn’t a proper tornado without a debris cloud.  Then I painted clouds over the upper part of the shirt.  He painted lightning bolts, and I sprinkled rain drops and hail liberally over the remainder of the shirt and pants.  He declared it done, and I hung them up to dry.

This morning I looked at them.  Up close, they were pretty clear, but from any distance you couldn’t tell what you were looking at.  Moreover, the dominant color was grey, and I want my kid to be visible on Halloween night.  I concluded that every storm had cloud cover, and that what was indicated was a hat.  So it was that I took scissors to muslin, making a cloud shape to be filled out with polyfluff, with a hole in the middle for an elastic filled casing.  That got more fluff glued to the top for the puffy top of the cloud.  Then I thought about it, and glued fluff to the shoulders and upper chest and back of the shirt as well.  And there he was, a super-cell with sneakers.

So my son won the school prize for most creative costume, and I got to escort a thunderstorm around a nearby neighborhood on a bright cold night.  But I liked best the answer my friend C. (mother of our son’s best friend) gave to someone who asked what the costume was.  “The little boy with the cloud?  Oh, he’s a tornado looking for a place to touch down.”

Preliminary: people call me with weird questions, always have. So today I got another one, which led to the following:

Me:  “May I remind you that I’m not the Encyclopedia Galactica?”

Caller:  “Maybe not, but sometimes I think you’re closely related to the card catalogue!”

No, that’s not a typo.

As I was walking into a public room in a hotel this weekend, I found my path blocked by a toddler.  He stood there, legs set wide and arms outspread, with a lightsaber clutched in his left hand, and announced “You may not pass” in tones as portentious as a 2 1/2 year old in a pirate shirt could manage.

I stood there in front of him, smiling.  “No?” I asked him.

“No!” he asserted, very firmly.  “You may not pass unwess you answer my widdle!”

“Ok.  What’s the riddle, little guardian?”

Pause.  Wave lightsaber.  Frown.  Think hard.  “I don’t know.”  And then, turning around, lightsaber dropping forgotten to the floor: “Mama? What’s my widdle?”

I just pulled up a weather website to check when this week I might plan on doing the final mowing of the season.  That serves two purposes; it gets the grass to a good level, and it circulates the fuel stabilizer throughout the engine of the mower.  It’s possible to drain a push-mower, though not fun.  It is not possible to fully drain a riding mower without a full mechanic’s shop, and we have a riding mower.  It’s noisy, it produces exhaust, and I am not going to tackle something over an acre with a push mower.  There is a time and a season to utilize modern technology, and this is such.

But anyway, this website has a link entitled “Rush Hour Conditions for…” and it fills in the name of the community for which you have searched for the forecast.  So it says “Rush Hour Conditions for Boone Grove, Indiana”.

Rush hour.  In Boone Grove.  With three streets and one (or maybe 2) stop signs.  No traffic light; the signs are sufficient.  A traffic jam this time of year consists of a combine trying to pass a tractor on the county road.

I think I can can live with this definition of “rush hour”.

Nine years ago now, on a tremendously windy day, a midwife looked up at me from the newborn in my hands and asked me “what’s his name?”  A few minutes earlier she’d had me put on hospital gloves and showed me where to place my hands, easing out the baby’s head and then holding it cradled in one hand; the other was ready in case I fumbled.  But I did not, and so it was that I caught my own son at his birth, a privilege given to very few mothers.

We had been childless – not childfree, as that implies a concious decision in the matter, and a choice.  We’d made our decisions and choices, we knew we wanted children, but to say that the gods of fertility had not been cooperative would have been a vast understatement.  Yet that evening, by the generousity of a gift of incredible grace and love, we became parents.  At two in the morning, our son’s birth-mother and I startled the nurses.  They came in to check on her, and found the two of us sitting up together and talking while I gave the baby – my baby, of her body – a bottle.

He’s nine now, so excited about the day that it took him an hour to fall asleep.  Happy birthday, son.  And to my sister by love and by choice, once again, thank you.

You’re going to a SCA event or con, and you don’t have a thing to wear. A peasant blouse and skirt look nice and costumey, and they’re very easy. So you choose some fabric and prepare to begin the process of constructing a drawstring-waist skirt. At that moment your adolescent kitten (say about six months old) wanders into your sewing space, winding around your ankles and purring madly. She is announcing her intent to assist.

Find another room and put her in it with toys to occupy her. Get out your tape measure; the first measurement you will need is the distance from your waist to the floor. Turn the tape measure so that the metal tip is down and drop it down to just touch the floor.

Lift the tape measure and remove kitten teeth and claws from same, taking the possessor of said implements of destruction in your free hand. Put her back in the room with the toys. Close the door.

Open the door before she claws her way through it or her mewing wakes the neighbors…in the next block. Roll the ball with the bell across the room, return to your sewing space, and measure the length from your waist to the floor. Then lay the fabric out to measure that length across the width of your fabric, plus three inches for hem and casing.

Pick up fabric, removing kitten claws in the process. Put kitten on another floor of your house, give her a catnip mouse, and return to your sewing area. Note kitten’s return to the feline play room (aka your sewing area) ahead of you as she runs between your ankles.

Slowly and carefully spread fabric out. Watch as kitten pounces on fabric. Pick it up carefully, fold it to put away, and choose sturdier fabric.

Spread sturdy fabric out, removing kitten from beneath as needed. Measure skirt length plus four inches. The extra inch is to allow for cutting off snags at the edge. Remove kitten claws from edge of fabric. Put away tape measure. Kitten will assist in this process by pouncing at the end of the tape each time it moves upward as you re-coil it.

Take fabric to ironing board. Lay out and plug in iron. Attempt to replace kitten-weighted fabric on ironing board. Brace ironing board with your body and begin to press in casing and hem, pausing to remove claw-attached kitten weight from edge of fabric each time you must shift it. After three or four moves, remove kitten teeth as well.

Catch kitten as she leaps for top of ironing board, landing on top of fabric and sliding down to hang by her claws as her weight begins to topple ironing board. Put ironing board back in place, put kitten in room with tightly closing door and toys, and finish ironing in folds while ignoring increasingly urgent howls and scratching from behind door.

When silence falls, breathe a sigh of relief, unplug iron and put the cord on top of the ironing board out of reach of kitten hunting practice, and take fabric to sewing machine. Remove kitten from chair, returning to other room to find door still tightly latched. Note that kitten has mastered feline teleportation at an early age, put kitten down, and pin side seam, lifting kitten periodically from lap to allow for shifting fabric. Note that kitten will return to lap, practicing jumping technique, every time she is returned to floor.

Examine sturdy fabric for shreds; trim same away. Smile: you added an extra inch for just such a contingency. Stitch seam(s), casing and hem. Tie ribbon drawstring to safety pin to thread through casing, cutting approximately an extra foot to allow for kitten depredation. Thread drawstring through casing, making certain not to draw up kitten as you do. Remove kitten from end of drawstring as necessary.

Try on skirt, noting that the length is sufficient to allow kitten to conceal herself underneath and pounce on innocent passersby from ambush. Remove skirt. Remove kitten from skirt. Fold and place in suitcase; zip closed to prevent further access to kitten.

Congratulate yourself. You have completed a drawstring skirt. Now all that remains is to lay out the pattern for a peasant blouse, cut it out, and sew it together. Kitten will assist with this project as well, with increased participation due to greater fragility of blouse-weight fabric. But that’s a lesson for another day.

There is an expression I picked up from somewhere. “Urph.” Personally, I use it when I’ve been imitating headless poultry and someone asks me how things are going. It’s a shorthand expression for “I’m trying to keep way too many balls in the air and my brain is turning into banana yogurt.”

What, you may ask, has that to do with my small son? Simple. He still has problems enunciating certain of the sounds of the English language. He can’t say a terminal “th”, so, for example “with” comes out “wif”. Now, he’s been reading Captain Underpants (which is a hoot) and he tries to act it out. So he just came through the living room pretending to be a zombie nerd, arms held stiffly before him, chanting “Must destroy Earth. Must destroy Earth!” Except it came out “Must destroy urph….” And there’s no way I can explain to him why I’m laughing so hard!

In theory, we now have broadband. It’s wireless, off a tower a few miles away. I listened to the various techs who came out to test reception, and finally thought of the barn. So I convinced someone who’d tested from the rooftop previously to come out a second time and test the barn roof, and lo, that fifty feet made all the difference. So now we have a little receiver-type-thing bolted to the roof of the barn, a whole long piece of cable the runs down the slant of the barn roof, over the edge, and through some pipe (100 feet of same) across the corner of the barnyard by a huge maple tree, and across the front of the house to the hole a prior tenant made to install satellite TV, which we didn’t want.

It worked fabulously well and quickly when the tech was here, slowed to snail’s pace 10 minutes later, and half an hour after that I’m using it to blog, and it seems to be working fine. We’ll have to see how well it turns out over time, but I am looking forward to cancelling our second phone line, at least one of the two dial-ups (I may consider keeping the cheaper one for travelling purposes), and being able to download things in less than a geologic epoch.

It took 15 months and a fair amount of stubborness on my part (a thing which has never been in short supply), but we may have recovered the last thing from city living I missed. I am at least cautiously optimistic.

Back in February, I bought a table loom, one that I’d wanted for a very long time.  I was and remain delighted by it, but had a slight problem; rewarping the loom and getting the lengths even was turning out to be more of a trick than I could manage.  Yes, I could buy pre-cut warps from the loom manufacturer, but then I was limited to their designs, which are in truth mostly for children.  I had been reading, and talking to weavers at the various fairs I went to, and had concluded that the indispensible tool for the task was a warping board.

Ok, fine.  My loom is quite small; 16″ beam (that’s fabric width), and only accepts about a 4 yard warp, which is one where each warp thread is 4 yards long.  So when I went looking for a warping board and found only those that wind between 14 and 40 yard warps, I could see only that they took up a vastly unnecessary amount of space and cost more than the loom had!

I finally found one that suits; a 4 1/2 yard warping board that comes apart or can be hung on a wall when not in use, and I have bought it.  Like the loom, it will be delivered in a week or so, and will promptly be put to good use.  I’m excited!

a classic fairytale in here somewhere. I have seen some creative things done with food, but I must say, this takes the, well – cake!