dual personalities

Spring arrived this week. The daffodils are blooming and new leaves are beginning to turn bare branches green. I’ve started spring cleaning the house and rearranging things a bit. Taking my DP’s advice, I did not reframe one of the etchings I recently purchased. It is now on the wall in son #1’s old room, where it sits above my other recent acquisitions, the dresser and mirror. Note the new curtains as well. I’m still deciding what to do with the smaller etching.

It probably seems as if I buy things all the time, but that’s not true. I’ve been on the lookout for a dresser, new curtains and a mirror for ages, and I’m on a tight budget, so I have to select carefully. It just so happened that it all came together in a short time. Months and sometimes years will go by while I look, and then bam, all at once I find exactly the right thing(s). Patience is the key.

In other news, the Christmas cactus continues to bloom and more buds are developing!

Aside from puttering around the house I’ve been reading Harry Carey Jr.’s autobiography. My DP recommended it, so I gave it to son James for Christmas, and after he read it, he passed it to me.

Though the book is full of great anecdotes about John Ford and John Wayne, one photo of Harry Carey Sr. holding his newborn son really struck my fancy.

I only knew HC Sr. from films he made when he was older, such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Angel and the Badman and Red River, but I had never seen him in his heyday as the star of westerns, so I decided to track one down. Last night on YouTube I watched one of his films called The Last of the Clintons (1935).

The plot concerns cattle theft and reminded me a lot of the Hopalong Cassidy movie I watched recently. The Last of the Clintons involves a lot of riding horses hell bent for leather, but Harry Carey has screen presence, a good voice and can certainly ride well. It’s easy to see how Carey’s acting style influenced other western stars. Even if the print is bad and it is sometimes difficult to hear, it’s good to watch people do their own stunts, ride like experienced cowhands and fist fight as if they are really doing it and not remembering a thousand carefully choreographed moves. I’m going to track down some more of his movies. In particular, I’d like to see his versions of the Last of the Mohicans and the Three Godfathers.

Have a wonderful weekend and remember:

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.” (Attributed to Victor Hugo, although I have been unable to verify.)

*A comment referring to cattle rustling — Angel and the Badman

Good morning, readers! I am writing to you from my craft room/office where I’m sitting in a vintage chair that did a real number on my back this weekend. I foolishly spent my glorious days off doing dangerous activities for a lady of my age including using my sewing machine and working on a puzzle. Never have I felt older. The subsequent back pain that plagued me for several days did not help the vibe. But, I am happy to report that today my back did not bother me all day and I was able to stand up without literally creaking.

Have you seen the people who comment on the internet that like it would have been really great if in high school we had learned how to do our taxes instead of like calculus? Well, the past few weeks, I’ve had to do a lot of math for someone who was an English Major and now does Communications for a living. I had to make spreadsheets and do cost benefit analysis. I had to calculate percentages. Excuse me while I gag.

I also had to request a calculator because the one on my phone couldn’t keep up with my speedy fingers. I’m not joking. This is what they dug up for me:

Y’all this vintage masterpiece is a behemoth. It is so big it has to be plugged in to function. But it did get the job done. I’m saving the state money (if my math was right, jokes nervously). Your tax dollars at work. I know my sister had a similar math-based week. And people say majoring in English leaves you with no marketable skills.

My whole week has very much had this vibe:

Also, this made me laugh.

I’m taking the day off today, and I plan to concentrate on the good things that happened this week. First, my stressed out Christmas cactus is thriving in its new location in my son’s room. It is blooming like crazy!

It has never produced so many flowers. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me. I thought I had all but killed it, so its recovery fills me with joy.

Second, I had a great last day of class. The students in my ancient warfare class wanted to end our strategy simulation with a battle, so I spent most of Thursday inventing a board game. Quelle challenge! There was math involved and I’m not good at math (understatement of the year). Consider: If there are 4 legions and each legion has 9 regular cohorts plus one first cohort, and each regular cohort is subdivided into six centuries and the first cohort into five centuries, and each regular century gets a ballista and a scorpion (artillery) but the centuries in the first cohort get double that, then how many ballistae and scorpions do I need? No wonder I get migraines. In the end I got the game ready, and my six groups paired off to determine the outcome of our fictional Civil War. Here’s a photo of two of the warring groups hard at work (the blotted out faces comply with FERPA regulations).

It looks tame, but the battles were intense and there was much hooting and hollering. They really got into it. They were a great group of students – I always left the classroom happier than when I went in, and during a semester that was otherwise extremely stressful (university politics – ugh) that made all the difference.

Finally, our tax return arrived! I’m planning a trip to the dollar store — if I can scrounge up the change to pay the taxes on my purchase.

I also love the fact that the check is void after one year. It could take me that long to decide how to spend all that dosh!

Have a blessed weekend and don’t forget, ““It is a good idea sometimes to think of the importance and dignity of our every-day duties. It keeps them from being so tiresome; besides, others are apt take us at our own valuation” (Laura Ingalls Wilder).

“Beyond what goes on in the world that makes the headlines, there is also what goes on in the small, private worlds you and I move around in and the news of our own individual days in those worlds. Some of the things that happen in them are so small that we hardly notice them, and some of them shake the very ground beneath our feet, but, whether they are great or small, they make up the day-to-day story of who we are and of what we are doing with our lives and what our lives are doing to us. Their news is the news of what we are becoming or failing to become.

Maybe the best time to look at that news is at night when we first turn out the light and are lying in the dark waiting for sleep to come. It is a time to look back at the wars that you and I have been engaged in for the last twenty-four hours, or twenty-four years for that matter, because there are none of us who do not one way or another wage war every day, if only with ourselves. It is a time to look back at our own searches for peace because deep beneath the level of all the other things we spend our time searching for, peace, real peace, is the treasure for which maybe we would all of us be willing to trade every other treasure we have. As we lie there in the dark, we might ask ourselves, what battles, if any, are we winning? What battles are we losing? Which battles might we do better not to be fighting at all, and which, in place of surrender, should we be fighting more effectively and bravely? We are churchgoers. We are nice people. We fight well camouflaged. We are snipers rather than bombardiers. Our weapons are more apt to be chilly silences than hot words. But our wars are no less real for all of that, and the stakes are no less high.

Perhaps the stakes are nowhere higher than in the war we all wage within ourselves–the battles we fight against loneliness, boredom, despair, self-doubt, the battles against fear, against the great dark. In the whole Bible there are perhaps no words that everybody, everywhere can identify with more fully than the ones St. Paul wrote to the Roman church: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (7:19). This is as rich a summation as any I know of the inner battle that we are all involved in, which is the battle to break free from all the camouflaged and not so camouflaged hostilities that we half deplore even as we engage in them, the battle to become what we have it in us at our best to be, which is wise and loving friends both to our own selves and to each other as we reach out not only for what we need to have but also for what we need to give.”

Frederick Buechner, The News of the Day