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Ringing in 2012

2011 was a hectic year. Here’s a list in no particular order:

  • I got married.
  • I went to Seattle.
  • I went to New Hampshire.
  • I read more books in 2011 than I did in 2010.
  • I returned to blogging.
  • I started lifting weights.
  • I ran 3 5k’s.
  • I spent a lot of time in my garden this spring, summer & fall.
  • I started writing letters.
  • I worked on my poetry manuscript.
  • I discovered I love Twin Peaks.
  • I cooked some new recipes (soup, cookies & pasta).
  • Our family dog, Basil, died December 23rd.
  • A friend and colleague died in Madrid a few weeks ago. 
  • My husband found a job & lost a job.
  • I took my students to the IMA and the IRT. 

 In 2012 I’d like to:

  • Write more poems.
  • Take up yoga.
  • Own some Zebra Finches.
  • Go on a trip with my husband to a state other than IN or PA.
  • Cook more vegetarian meals.
  • Plant more flowers/shrubs.
  • Read more books & magazines.
  • Complete my promotion portfolio to Associate Professor.
  • Improve my teaching & be more creative/innovative.
  • Work on a photography project.
  • Join a neighborhood book club. 
  • Keep working out & run some more 5k’s.

I’m not big on “resolutions” because I think it puts unnecessary stress on people which sets them up for failure. I prefer to think of my list as an ongoing list of goals that I’m continuously building on.

I wish you all the best for the remainder of 2011 and I’ll see you in 2012.

Letter Writing Kits

This Christmas my family put a spending limit on gifts. I was in full support of this plan because I already had brilliant ideas for Christmas for several members of my family. This idea came to me awhile ago when I was thinking about how I used to write letters as a kid. This particular memory of letter writing happened to coincide with meeting a new friend from Chicago who is involved in something called The Letter Writers Alliance. This all occurred a few years ago and it got me to thinking that I should start writing letters again. However, as usual, life got in the way until a few weeks ago when I could finally start putting my plan into action.

I wanted to write letters again, but I also wanted to people to write letters to, so that’s when the letter writing kits came into being. I thought they would make perfect gifts for my sister, my mother & my best friend for Christmas this year. I would assemble the kits and postmark their first letter on December 22, 2011  so they would receive them in the mail shortly after Christmas. Then they could pen their response to me using their new kit.

What goes in a letter writing kit? Well, this is where the creative side of my brain begins to have fun.  Here I give you a list of what I included:

1. Stamps

I bought these little boxes at Michael’s. Digging in the bins to find the right initials was fun.

2. Gold Seals.

The shopping gods were with me. I found all the right initials. Again.

3. Whimsical note cards (whimsical is such a great word).

Who doesn’t like wine or clocks?

4. A membership to the Letter Writers Alliance & a starter kit

Courtesy of The Letter Writers Alliance.

5. Good pens.

6. A beautiful box to house all of these fun items in.

These are the letters I wrote to my sister, mom & best friend

I did the stamping to make envelopes look prettier. I forgot how much I loved stamps. Those are gingko leaves on my sisters envelope. By the time this post goes up, they will have received their letters and hopefully will be writing one back to me.

Christmas Back East

Pike family Christmas tree.

Kit Kat is 17 years old.

One of my favorite decorations at my parent’s house.

A giant amaryllis bulb. I cannot wait till it opens.

Presque Isle.

The is the first time in five years that we have not had a white Christmas in Erie.
We took their bed…

How my husband feels about walks.

A windy day in Pittsburgh.

Beautiful homes in Virgina Manor.

We don’t have these in Indiana. Boo!

For Basil

A Dog Has Died

My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I’ll join him right there,
but now he’s gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I’ll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I’ll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he’d keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea’s movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean’s spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don’t now and never did lie to each other.

So now he’s gone and I buried him,
and that’s all there is to it.

~Pablo Neruda


Basil during Christmas 2008. 



Holiday Greetings from 22 N. Bosart

We’re heading back east today to visit family for the holidays, so I leave you with a photo montage from our home this Christmas. My next blog post will most likely come to you from Erie or Pittsburgh. Stay tuned & save travels to all!

My friend from work made me a snowflake on a particularly gloomy day last week. She rocks.

Zombies love Christmas too. See whose name is on the ornament?

Paperwhites from our wedding.

Fir boughs from our Christmas tree.

This year I kept the outside decorations simple.

Candles and evergreens.

This would look better with some snow…

We did colored lights this year. Again, snow is needed.

Holiday Mail

I bypassed sending holiday cards to the masses this year for a simple reason: I got married. Between my save the date cards, wedding invitations and the the thank you notes (that just went out less than a month ago) I figured that everyone had heard enough from me. However, I did take part in a Holiday Card Swap for fun and this weekend I received my first letter from my pen pal.

Last week I received this in my mailbox:

Hooray!

I sat down right away and penned a letter to my new pal.

A few days later this appeared:

I love Tiger Lilies.

So this weekend, I wrote to my second pen pal. I was full of holiday spirit having just finished a batch of grading, so in addition to to a letter, my second pal received a paper snowflake and a scented pencil that smells like a candy cane.

After receiving my first letter in the mail, I have to say I am completely thrilled with the feeling I get when I get to open a real live letter.

In other news, cards from my Holiday Card Swap have been rolling in:

A sheer bounty of cleverness.

I love receiving mail over the holidays. Support the post office and send letters!

Holiday Card Swap

My friends, Donovan Beeson and Kathy Zadrozny over at 16 Sparrows  are extremely talented and you should all go look at their blog and buy their products. They are also the founders of The Letter Writers Alliance, whose mission statement is “…dedicated to preserving the art of the handwritten letter, neither long lines, nor late deliveries, nor increasing postal rates will keep us from our mission.”

I used to  write letters when I was younger. When my dad lived in Erie, PA few a few months before my mom, sister and I followed him out there, we used to exchange letters weekly. He wrote his notes on this stationary that had little tanks on the front of it and the inside of the card read “Many Tanks.” He always crossed that line out. I also wrote to my best friend, Jo-Anne Venezia, after we left Hartford, CT for Erie, PA. As is the case with most things, I stopped writing letters because life got in the way blah blah blah…

Anyway. Donovan and Kathy are inspiring me to begin writing letters again, which has lead to a couple of projects over the past few weeks. However, while reading the The Letter Writers Alliance blog, I stumbled across this: The 5th Annual Card Swap. I love this idea, so a few weeks ago I made my cards.

I’m not an artist but these were really fun to make…

Noticing a theme? I really like this stamp 🙂

I also really like water color pencils. 

This was a fantastic idea and I just received my list of recipients tonight. I can’t wait to write my greetings and get these out in the mail.

Amusing Happenings at the Mall During the Holidays

At the risk of sounding a little grinch-like, I’m not real big on the mall during the holiday season. This is  because on most regular days during the non-holiday season, I feel pretty good about humanity. I don’t mind navigating people to park my car or to look for a new sweater or return a table cloth. However, when the holidays roll around, all bets are off. It seems that in name of Christmas, seemingly normal people turn into raging, greedy consumers. Call me a wimp, but I’d rather just avoid seeing that side of people all together.

All of this being said, a few days ago I found myself here:

Indianapolis Fashion Mall.

I had some errands to run and I am pleased to report that during this trip to the mall I did not lose all faith in humanity. In fact, rather unexpectedly, I got some free entertainment. Below are some of the  hilarious things I witnessed while moving among the masses at the mall:

1. While at Anthropologie*, I overheard the following conversation between a group of middle aged women:

Woman #1: I have these weird red splotches on my cheeks. I just saw them in the mirror.
Woman #2: Do you have dry skin? I have some moisturizer in my purse. [Digs in her purse].
Woman #3: Your skin can get chapped from the cold. I heard that on the Today show. Did you see it?
Woman #1: No, it’s because I’ve been drinking. I have this problem where my cheeks turn pink after I drink wine.
Woman #2 & #3: Are you allergic?
Woman #1: Maybe. There’s something in wine that makes my cheeks turn bright red. I shouldn’t drink while I shop.

*I am not making this up. Also, it was 1:30 in the afternoon and finally, do you think that the mysterious substance that turns your cheeks red could be oh, I don’t know, alcohol?

2.Yeti boots are making a comeback in a big way. If you are not familiar with “yeti boots” see the picture below:

What makes this really funny is that I thought I coined the term “yeti boots.” But a Google search proved otherwise. Although, if you’re hip, you spell it “yeti bootz“

3. At The Gap a very pretty young woman and her  husband have the following conversation:

Woman: Babe, I need some new jeans.
Man: OK. What kind?
Woman: I’m not sure…[she pauses to look through a pile of jeans]
Man: How about these? [he holds up a teeny tiny pair of leggings]
Woman: NO! No, no, no, no…[voice is rising in pitch]
Man: OK [he drops the leggings and backs away from her]
Woman: I can’t wear these! When have I ever worn a size 4? [voice is still rising]*

*I walked away at this point. There’s only so long that you can watch a train wreck.

Also at The Gap I realized that they still have Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” on the  Christmas soundtrack, except in an attempt to show diversity, it is now sung in Spanish? Yeah, I don’t know. 

4. At Crate and Barrel there were two little girls wearing these:

 They were dancing, and I mean for real dancing, in the middle of the store to Jingle Bell Rock. It was awesome.

5. Outside Saks Fifth Avenue some dude says into his cell phone, “Just what the f*ck is a pashmina and where do I buy one?”

Merry Christmas!

Happy Holidays from McSweeny’s!

If you have not ever looked at the McSweeny‘s website, you’re missing out. I was first introduced to this website by my husband, who also encouraged me to read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by David Eggers.  This is part of the blurb on their website:

McSweeney’s began in 1998 as a literary journal, edited by Dave Eggers, that published only works rejected by other magazines. But after the first issue, the journal began to publish pieces primarily written with McSweeney’s in mind. Since then, McSweeney’s has attracted works from some of the finest writers in the country, including Denis Johnson, William T. Vollmann, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Heidi Julavits, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Ben Marcus, Susan Straight, Roddy Doyle, T.C. Boyle, Steven Millhauser, Gabe Hudson, Robert Coover, Ann Beattie, and many others.

These are some of my holiday favorites (new and old):

Stopping By Woods on a Bro-y Evening

The Twelve Days of Christmas*

The Corporate Christmas Party As Told By My Cocktails


 
Staff Editorial from the Who-Ville Picayune, January 1958


Donner Looks Back

*Hilary Knight’s The Twelve Days of Christmas is one of the best versions in print.

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