Tag: novemberdaily

Fireside family time

November 16th, 2015

Last Sunday, I told the kids “We’re going to build our first fire tonight.” They jumped up and down and eagerly anticipated it all day, as did I.

We don’t have a television in our living room, in the room with the fireplace. It is more of a sitting, reading, and lay-on-the-couch-with-the-kittens-on-your-chest kind of room. As I navigated my Sunday — grocery shopping, a walk in the park — I was as giddy about our first fire as the kids were. I envisioned us playing board games to the sound of wood popping. I’m tired of all the games we have, so I made a detour to Target and picked up a couple of basics: Blokus and Boggle. A spatial game and a word game to suit the strengths of the different factions of our family.

Sunday night we chilled a bottle of white wine and ate a dinner of bruschetta and crostini, cheeses, and fruits. The fire snapped in the living room while we ate, and kittens perched on the hearth watching the flames, curious.

We have now lit a fire and played games together two nights in a row. The kids don’t ask about TV. Who wants to sit in the basement and stare at a screen when we could be upstairs with the fire, engaging in ~~fierce~~ friendly competition?

Even more exciting than fires two nights in a row: the family loves Boggle, a puzzle where you build words out of randomly arranged letters. On Sunday I had a great game and beat everyone handily. Monday, though, the competition was stiffer. I was the one to bring down and my husband almost got me.

Next time? Who knows. But it’s awfully nice to have a warm hearth to turn to each night, to drink wine or whiskey or hot chocolate by, to sit in front of and feel its warmth while laughing over board games with the family.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Trying not to freak out

November 15th, 2015

I speak at WordCamp US in Philadelphia on December 4: in 19 days. That’s not as many days from now as I thought.

I have written my script. I have submitted my slides. I have practiced aloud at least a dozen times. But I’m still reading my words from a page — I do not yet know the talk by heart. I need notes.

I feel good about my talk when I preview my slides. I feel good about my talk when I practice aloud with my script in front of me.

But the room I’m speaking in. I saw a picture of it. There are a great many seats in there. Like, more than 300. I’m a little nervous. Maybe a lot nervous.

I think I’ll bump my rehearsals to twice a day.

I’m trying not to psych myself out by thinking about how big this event is. By thinking about how many people will be looking at me.

Instead, I’m trying to remind myself I have something valuable to contribute. Instead of freaking out, I am preparing. I stand when I rehearse, like I learned from speaking coach Luca Sartoni. I practice aloud, feeling for places where I stumble so I can tweak the wording. I record my rehearsals on audio so I can listen for redundancies. I take comfort in the the tips I learned in the Get Speaking! workshop I attended.

I know I can do this. I will be ready. I will rock this thing.

But still, that room is scary.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
As the birds fly south

November 14th, 2015

It’s time to start cooking winter foods: chili, soups, casseroles. Hearty meals that warm you from the inside. As the birds fly south, it’s time to invest in hot cocoa and Baileys.

I wonder what it’s like up there for those birds on the long, autumn journeys south. Do they talk? How do they know where they’re going, and do they revisit the same place every year?

Think of it way up there. Ahead: sky, clouds, the curvature of the earth. Cragged mountains on the horizon — snow-capped in the western United States, domes of skeleton trees in the east. If the birds fly before the leaves drop, then in the east they would see domes of harvest colors: orange, gold, scarlet, brown.

Below, the birds would see patchworks of farm land: green, yellow, and brown quilts. They’d see the squiggles of rivers, the the density of trees in a park surrounded by roads and development; they’d see the world at a scale we rarely see as humans, unless we travel in airplanes a lot.

What a way to be. To travel great distances every year, seeking a climate that suits the season, covering vast expanses of of earth and sky, watching it all, unencumbered by the shield of a car and a seatbelt, or the encasement of an airplane, or even the chin strap of a helmet.

Thank you to Grumpy Axolotl for the prompt “As the birds fly south.”

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Lumber

November 13th, 2015

When I was six years old, my parents began building a house on a tiny island called a “hammock.” We lived on Wilmingon Island at the time, in a ranch-style house in a small subdivision. Wilmington Island had several neighborhoods, but it was pretty far out in the boonies at the time — 10 minutes outside of Savannah, Georgia. Cable TV wasn’t wired out to the island, and we couldn’t even get pizza delivered.

The house my parents were building was even further out of Savannah, near Tybee Island. Unlike pizza-free Wilmington, Tybee was an incorporated town. There were restaurants and the elementary school where my brother and I were bussed every day: across the bridge by Williams Seafood, along the eight-mile causeway through wide expanses of marsh, and across another bridge that shrimp boats docked beneath. We could see the Tybee lighthouse, the Savannah River, and the Atlantic ocean from the second bridge.

When the house was under construction, the neigborhood consisted of two dirt roads and a handful of houses, all with waterfront access. The island is a narrow finger of land, surrounded by tidal rivers and creeks: salt marsh in the west, and the wide Back River then the ocean to the east. There was a small bridge to the island, then a rutted dirt road. We’d take a right turn after the bridge, and down the dusty road on the left, we saw the smooth concrete slab of our house’s foundation, and the yellow lumber framework that would become the kitchen, the living room, our bedrooms.

The place was littered with nails and steel and all sorts of sharp objects. My brother and I didn’t care. There was nothing more exciting in our childhood lives than exploring our house-in-progress. Our parents often took us out there in the evenings, after school. Every time we visited there were new parts: the framing, then plywood walls, then bathtubs and drywall and windows and doors.

The best part was the smell: salt marsh mixed with the scent of freshly cut lumber. Brined air laden with the woody fragrance of sawdust. The scent was of newness and nature, of shelter, of creation.

Whenever I smell lumber, whether at Home Depot or on a sidewalk next to a building-in-progress, it takes me back. Back to the construction site of my childhood home, where I’d inhale deeply to take it all in: the salt air, the sawdust, home.
Dry-stone wall

November 12th, 2015

When I hear “dry-stone wall,” the first thing I think of is a wet stone wall: moss-covered with a sparkling trickle of water running down damp cobbles, or the clammy stone walls of a cave.

But a dry-stone wall? Where does that happen?

In sunlight. In fact I have a picture of the stone chimney of a cabin at Mabry Mill on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It’s one of my favorite photographs. I love stone, and I alway want to use the image for social media profiles: my Twitter or Facebook header. But what does an image of a stone wall say about me if I use it as a banner? Other than my love of earth and rock, the photograph does not portray me, so I upload it, preview it, overthink it, then remove it.

I’ll add it as the featured image here instead.

The problem is the hyphen. Why is there a hyphen in “dry-stone” in this prompt? Is dry-stone a thing — is it something different from sun-warmed cobbles, from the smooth uneven structure of a stone chimney?

I cheated. I stopped my timer to look up dry-stone:

adj. 1. (of a wall) made without mortar

Does that mean the stones are pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle? This indentation lays on this protrusion, this jag fits in this cranny? I think it does. The chimney in my image has no mortar.

I see low walls like this in the mountains. I seem to remember one that stretched for miles in Shenendoah, about knee-height, of thousand and thousands of stones pieced together without anything to bind them. Yet the structure was somehow stable, somehow not tumbling to pieces. A masterpiece of irregular parts fitting together to make something regular. A dry-stone wall.

Thank you Dapplegrey for the prompt, “dry-stone wall.”

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.
Giggles

November 11th, 2015

When our daughter was eight, she’d have one friend over at a time. On a Saturday, a little friend would come over for the afternoon, and for four hours, they would giggle.

They’d eat a snack, look at each other, and burst into the tinkling sound of little girl laughter. They did not need a reason to laugh, the joy and silliness just bubbled out.

As the girls age, they still giggle. Our daughter is almost 10 now, and when she has a friend over, there are frequent bursts of laughter for no apparent reason. The laughs are deeper now — not as high pitched and airy as an eight-year-old giggle. The giggle fits are often inspired by a boy somewhere in the vicinity: our son, or his friend if he has one over.

I remember the days of giggle fits, where I’d start laughing and couldn’t stop. And then my mom would say, “Some one turned Andrea’s giggle box over,” and I’d laugh even harder, until tears streamed down my face and my abs felt like I’d crunched 100 sit-ups.

A laugh that goes so deep you forget what you’re laughing at, and that lasts so long it hurts, is one of the best feelings in the world. I hope our daughter has thousands of them.

Photo credit: Bubbles by pandajenn1234.

For the month of November, I will be participating in NaBloPoMo and plan to publish every day of the month. Usually, I will publish a 10-minute free write, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Follow along with the tag #NovemberDaily.

Tag: novemberdaily

Fireside family time

Trying not to freak out

As the birds fly south

Lumber

Dry-stone wall

Giggles