Holy you would have thought I'd asked them to turn the electricity off for a whole day rather than an hour, but we made it! We had a romantic candle lit dinner, and discussed how Earth Day isn't just something we celebrate in Canada, that in fact it's celebrated all over the world, apparently just not the US ;)
It was cool though, for the most part we refrained from using our phones, and we only fell into the "how much longer till we can turn the lights on" thereby making it that much longer, a couple times... so we had to be social the old fashioned way, which led to the deep contemplative conversation of
"What would it be if you crossed a Shitzhu with a Cock-a-poo?... a Shit-poo!!!"
I'm having trouble reconciling this beautiful weather with my Canadian bones that are whispering "winter is coming" I keep putting on a sweatshirt before I go outside, and then immediately having to take it off!
On the way home recently I saw a lady who looked like she was working on her lawn, she had on gardening gloves, a freshly pulled weed in one hand and a medium Chinese style meat cleaver in the other...
I did one of those mental double takes, but we drove by too fast to tell what she was actually using it for. Since then my brain has been working overtime trying to come up with a plausible explanation.
I think we got lucky... and we were foolish, but overall it worked out ;)
We booked an early breakfast at Be our guest, which turned out to be awesome because they let us in to the park early for reservations, which meant we were able to jump in line ahead of the horde for the Seven Dwarfs ride we couldn't fast pass...
And in staying at a Disney resort we got extra magic hours, which were two at the end of the night... So we pretty much went on EVERYTHING we wanted to, and then some :D
It's barely 6 and a half hours since I went to bed last night...and probably more like 4 since I fell asleep barely able to contain my excitement in anticipation of Disney World! My eyeballs hate me and I briefly wonder if the juice had enough time to neutralize... no matter, ready or not... here we go!
Looking out the window as we descend, there is a whisper of a reflection of the moon if you know where to look, jumping from puddle to lake and reflecting off of the edges of the strangest things just beyond reach it easily keeps pace with us until at last it is revealed in a golden splash, looking even more magnificent than the cold bright white coming off it directly.
I had to look back through the instructions twice, and apparently I missed the fourth step... (I'm not even kidding!) So I did this whole thing without the fourth... but I knew it could never be complete without the fourth...
I've been struggling with "getting everything out"... it isn't writers' block, it's something I think that is more akin to trying to drink from a firehose.
I've had so many incredible days, and trips, and things that I'm really excited about and awesome pictures that I want to share, and the fact that I just can't seem to get it all in the right place at the right time is... it's frustrating, and it's messing up my flow, and I'm ready to be done with all the excuses for why I haven't written anything.
The other day I started thinking that something really important to my writing is *moments* and that maybe the reason I'm having so much trouble is that I'm trying to save time and write about a day... but maybe it doesn't work like that, and so it comes out chunky and awkward like mac 'n cheese before the cheese is properly melted.
I don't want to share some diatribe of how my day went, inundating you with all the boring minutia of things that don't really matter. Although, I do realize that this is a matter of perspective, and some of the things I share may not matter to you at all, but please know that for one reason or another they matter to me.
"If it mattered before the election, it matters now" I can't find the original article but thank you fellow artist, this has been resonating with something inside my brain and I think it may have jiggled my wordjam loose! *grins*
At one point in my career I was feeling overpaid for what I was actually doing... like any monkey could do what I do, when a friend said to me "They don't pay you for what you do, they pay you for what you know".
I've thinking about it... I know a lot of things now, but it isn't like I'm some great repository of knowledge, I don't *do* anything that anyone else couldn't do... but I know what makes me different, is the experiences I've had and learned from.
The other night I had the pleasure of helping an old friend with something that I had previously worked on.
Something that I had spent hours, nay possibly a few days bashing my head against, tearing my hair out, and attempting to manhandle into place. The golden nugget at the end of it all, was learning that you didn't just have to make the right changes... but that in order to actually see the changes, you had to completely clear your browser cache.
So yes, what I *do* may only take seconds, and may seem trivial once you know it... but knowing that you need to do those things, especially those small important details is what makes you worth your weight in gold.
Some mornings are a pry-yourself-out-of-bed with the incentive of a warm cup of coffee... and some mornings are a rude awakening to the realization that the dog pooped by the door and you have to clean it before you can let her out again, later followed by more pooping by the door when you don't let her out because you thought she was done pooping already.
I read once that when you make a mistake you should take immediate steps to correct it...
Last year my friend's Auntie Mayweather lent us her parole (it's a traditional Philipino Christmas decoration, some are more elaborate than others but as far as I have seen they are all beautiful). It came to us in a large black plastic garbage bag, the string of blue lights were burnt out and the cord was wrapped in masking tape where it had be twisted together with the plug end... but it looked wonderful blinking in the window - after I immediately replaced the masking tape with electricians tape of course.
Some months later while innocuously playing scrabble we heard a large crash outside and then nothing... probably cats, thinking nothing of it until the next morning when I discovered the wreath box I thought I'd so cleverly entombed the parole in on the floor... with a slightly bent and broken parole inside.
My heart sank.
On a number of levels I felt responsible. I shouldn't have put it in the wreath box without modifying (dremeling) it so it fit better, and I should have put some kind of padding in there with it... at very least a towel. *exhales*
Of course this happened not long before Christmas, when people *cough* Auntie Mayweather *cough cough* would notice it was missing. The initial look is always the worst, your worst fears manifest themselves and it's broken broken. The second look, where I took a deep breath and actually looked was much better. I realized that none of the shells were broken, and for the most part things had just popped out of place.
It took a few days of mentally preparing myself to hunker down and start the project of "fixing" it.
The girls joked that we should take a picture and say that I was "making a parole" Martha Stewart style because I'm crafty like that, but I was still too nervous that I wouldn't be able to pull it off and that pre-emptively taking a picture would somehow jinx my chances of completion.
Also, I say "fixing" because it turned into six hours of hunched over tongue biting concentration, composed of vary degrees of holding my breath, sweating, swearing, crossing my fingers, praying and crazy-gluing my fingers together countless times before I had the outer half edge of the parole back into more or less the right shape. Save two points which were under slightly too much strain to crazy glue.
*exhales* This was when I started to feel like it really might be possible to fix it fix it. I took a drink of water, and then began "phase 2". The purpose of phase 2 was to reinforce everything, and make it fixed forever. I gathered some tiny clamps and a disposable paint brush and mixed up the small choose your own adventure travel size epoxy.
One of my favorite quotes of my Dad's is that:
"Epoxy is forever"
Another hour or so, a stiff paint brush and four quickly solidifying piles of epoxy later and I had dabbed each of the joints of the outer ring and clamped the two remaining points that the crazy glue couldn't hold.
*exhales*
Now we can talk about me building a parole *weak smile* at this point I was tired and relieved... there was still work to be done, but we had reached the tipping point where I knew it was doable and I was fully confident in my emergency arts and crafts abilities. With the Ninja's help and her extra set of very patient hands, we hot glued all the lights that had popped off back in place, and found that with a little luck the first blue bulb she touched just needed a little jiggle to settle back in place and the whole string lit up again!
*grins* Now we're golden, not only is it fixed, but it's better than when we got it.
As a final touch I clipped and soldered the power cable with appropriate amounts of shrink tubing in all the right places, and called it a day. The parole looks awesome in the window, feeling is slowly returning to my fingertips as the crazy glue peels off, and there are only two panels where we got the lights slightly out of order... but you probably wouldn't notice unless I told you muahahahaaa ;)
It is still a mystery why it jumped off the filing cabinets after all that time up there undisturbed, one theory is that it was the ghost of Houdini the bird that escaped his cage (Auntie Mayweather's bird to be precise) - but that's a story for another day... In any case, I feel as though I were able to live true to an old Girl Guide saying of "leave things better than when you found them."
I read a book once where angels in a war of cosmic proportions had been knocked into another dimension... each one of them acquired varying degrees of magic in this new place and one that I found particularly fascinating was a master musician, that when he played golden notes materialized out of thin air, floated while the note rang true and then simply faded away.
I think if I had this ability my trumpet notes would come out bronze, some of them would be shiny and some of them would be dull... some of them would have a little too much aluminum, and some a little too much tin, and occasionally they would be something else like iron :p
It occurs to me as I sit here looking at my recovering sleeplessly sunken visage at the hairdressers that if I worry any more deeply, people will start to wonder about my shadow of a lobotomy scar that won't turn into Granny's adorable furrow for at lease another 30 years... *sigh* :/
