Easter Eggs

Last night was my egg decorating extravaganza. It was fun, but it was a lot harder and more time consuming than I had anticipated too. Plus, I went through all the trouble of locating egg stencils on the Internet and then forgot to print them and take them with me before going over to Heidi’s.

Oh well. Left with only my imagination, I think I managed alright. So let’s start with this first picture which is supposed to be Me, Harmony, and Heidi. Harmony painted the one of me and her mom and I painted hers. Frankly, I think I look like Kenny from South Park, but whatever. Maybe Harmony thinks I need to put my hair up.

Ok, next up. Of course I had to paint something with cherries on it. I think for future egg projects, I and going to need some super tiny brushes. We had to make due with the brushes we had, but they were really too big to be working on tiny designs. For the stems, I ended up using one of the markers that came with the egg dye kit.

My first egg was a little more “fancy pants” in its design. I wanted flowers wrapped all around it. I think it turned out alright, but I need to get the spacing more even. Harmony started to get a little annoyed with me since I was completing one egg for every 4 she was decorating.

So I finally decided to try one of the egg stencils that came with the dye kit. This was my attempt to get on the “mass production line” of egg decorating that Harmony was using. The duckies were cute, but not really my thing.

I had every intention of decorating the plastic eggs I bought, but it was getting late. I’ll have to try that next.

Spring forward to Christmas?

So this weekend I have been invited to decorate Easter eggs with Heidi and Harmony. As usual, with any art project, I am most likely going to go completely overboard. I have been online looking at egg stencils. This led me to look at Faberge egg stencils, naturally.

Wow. The stuff I found was great. Since I have decided to go with a Russian theme for my Christmas tree this year, I was so excited to stumble across all this stuff now. I have now become educated on a new term: blown eggs.

Apparently, these are real eggs that have had small holes poked into them at either end and then the contents are “blown” out. Sounds kind of gross really and a bit unsanitary, but if it’s just me I don’t really care all that much. For those of you coming to visit, I would be wary of me offering to make you eggs in the morning. I am just worried about really being able to get in there and rinse the eggs out afterward to make sure nothing funky happens to them.

I also found a site on line that sells blown eggs. Hmmm…they are actually pretty cheap, but it seems a bit extravagant for something I could do myself. Then there is the other alternative of going to a craft store and buying polystyrene eggs. That might work if I decide to do something with fabric and glue or whatever. LOL…I think I may now have a legitimate reason for buying a Bedazzler!!!!

Now if I could just find my statue of St. Basil’s for the tree topper I would really be in business.

Dutiful Daughter

So today is my mother’s birthday. Ever the dutiful daughter I called her. I make it sound like a bit of a trial and honestly, it isn’t. My mom and I get along just fine. Granted, it wasn’t always the case, but years of work and a bit of forgiveness have come to fruition and we now enjoy a relatively easy relationship.

I was actually pleased to hear that she was out at a restaurant and couldn’t talk for long. Not because I wanted to cut the conversation short, but because I was glad that she wasn’t at home alone.

During our brief conversation, she said something to me which I know I will dissect endlessly. She did the “mom” thing and asked about my social life. While I was giving her the update she remarked that I was a unique individual and that she didn’t know anyone like me. She qualified it by saying that she knows that everyone is unique and so forth, but she thinks I received an extra helping of “different” somewhere along the way. In the past, this is where I would try to figure out if this was a veiled insult or another instance of the fact that my mom doesn’t “get me.” However, I believe that she just meant it as an observation. Perhaps I am reaching, but I sounded a bit like a puzzle she hadn’t quite figured out. Like tuning in to watch a soap, she was full of questions about what I had going on in my life these days in the desert.

So, I took one more step into the waters and told her some of my thoughts about why I might be a bit different. It’s a little strange to confide in her, but what the heck, right? Anyway, it was kind of fun. Taking for granted that a lot of people regularly confide in their mother, this is weird for me.

I wish the other members of my family had as easy a time with her as I do now. I suppose we all have to find our own way to mending whatever emotional fences need mending. Some will do it and some won’t. Always leading the charge it seems is Dad. Since Linda passed away he seems to have back pedaled a bit on the whole forgiveness thing, and I have to wonder if the 2 things aren’t connected somehow. But analyzing my father isn’t the point of today’s blog, so I will leave that topic there.

In the end, another pleasant conversation with my mother happened and that’s the best ending I could have hoped for.

Spring Cleaning

I have had the very seasonal urge to do some Spring cleaning. It appears that I have decided to start this process with the blog. I was going through a folder with some discarded ideas and came across this one. It is titled “Go as You Mean to Go On.” It strikes me as funny since I never finished it. I think memories led me only so far down a path and then I was stuck. Only later did I come back to the acting topic to try and tackle it alone. That being said, I have decided to go ahead and publish as is in its unfinished state. Since the topic deals with decisions and living with the results, it is never a finished topic anyway.

Let’s face it; change is hard for all of us. It can be small changes like switching from 2% to 1% milk or sweeping changes like having a child or immigrating to another country. Regardless of your chosen transformation, you either accept it gracefully (honestly, can you really taste a difference?) or you completely spiral downward into an existential crisis and start pondering age old questions like “Why am I here?” and “What is my purpose?” Perhaps I exaggerate on the level of navel-gazing, but you get my point. If changing the milk you drink causes you to question your existence, then you probably have some bigger issues at play and should seek professional help.

I think we all question the choices we make and the wonder if the results were worth it. Some might say this is a pointless exercise. The past is the past, right? What’s done cannot be undone so why waste the energy on looking back rather than forward? What is the phrase I am thinking of here? “Go as you mean to go on.” Is that it? I don’t know. It seems like I heard or read that line somewhere recently. Anyway, it seems to have stuck with me for the time being, so maybe I am just pondering what that phrase means to me.

To me it sounds like a battle cry of sorts. It sounds decisive and focused and conjures images of plowing through obstacles as if they don’t exist. It also makes me think about something out of the Successories catalog. Is anyone else having visions of some guy hanging by one hand off the shear face of a cliff? I may not have that sort of “I eat obstacles for breakfast” determination, but I do find myself thinking about the type of determination I do have.

Have I taken my life in the direction I thought I would take it? Good grief, no. There have been thousands of decisions along the way that shaped the place I find myself now. The good or the bad of it is less important than what I did with the results. Looking back at how I got here is like following a trail of bread crumbs through a maze.

I am reminded of some exercise I did in elementary school where we had to draw a picture of the type of career we wanted when we grew up. I believe I drew a picture of a secretary. That’s funny to me now. Of course, I also remember wanting to be a fireman and an actress. The actress bug had me in its grips for quite some time. The idea of always pretending to be someone different really appealed to me. I felt it in every fiber of my being that I would be really good at it. So what happened?

It was at this point I faltered. It amuses me to think about the elementary school exercise and wonder about what kind of drawing I would produce today. I still think secretary is off the list, although I can still appreciate the orderliness of it. Perhaps what I should be questioning is my love of office supplies?

Nom de Plume

I saw a funny article on MSN today regarding the worst recorded baby names. While looking through some of the more bizarre names, I found one that I thought would be fantastic as a pen name for a novelist. Okay, a name for me then: Cherry Grant.

How perfect is that? Combining my favorite actor and my favorite obsession? Cherry Grant. I love it. What kind of books do you think Cherry Grant writes?

Girlfriends

So this weekend I ended up at my friend Heidi's. Not so unusual, right? This weekend she had a few of her childhood friends in town to visit. Apparently it had been many years since they all had been together. I was reluctant to come over because I knew there would be a lot of "inside joke" moments and other "remember when" times that would leave me clueless. Besides, if this was her old girlfriend weekend, why would she want me to come over anyway?

Obviously I ended up going over there. And for the most part it was fine. The girls were all very nice and although they are all about 6-7 years younger than me, we seemed to find some things to talk about. I suppose the strangest part for me is thinking that my baby sister just turned 32 this week and here I am hanging out with people even younger than her. It shouldn't matter, and while I was sitting there talking to them it really didn't. Still, there were times when some of the the things they talked about or did while I was there couldn't help but make me feel so much um....wiser I suppose.

Once the girl drama started to pick up after midnight, I knew it was time for me to leave. I am sitting here today trying to recall if there was ever a time in my life when I was angry enough with a girlfriend to yell and scream and almost come to blows. Ha! It makes to laugh to even try to imagine it. I suppose the last girl I was ever that angry with was my freshman roommate in college. Even with that, I was way too passive aggressive to do much more than quietly seeth in her presence and then complain about her to others later. Ah youth!

Still, I can't fault Heidi for being angry with her friends that decided getting high in the next room from her sleeping daughter was a good idea. Once that little faux paus was revealed, I knew the party was over. I never cared for the stuff myself and can't stand the smell, so yet another reason to call it a night. Besides, I am way too much of a control freak to think that altering my brain with drugs to be anywhere near fun.

Honestly, a fun girl night for me is sitting around the table with a bottle of wine and playing board games. Damn I miss my girlfriends! I don't care how old or boring it sounds. I suppose the club hopping and mindless consumption of alcohol is just something I outgrew. I'll still go to a club now and then but the people that know me best know it is an effort for me these days to do it willingly. I am much happier with smaller get togethers than stuck in a mass of people with music so loud you are reduced to hand signals to communicate. I definitely turn into a cranky old lady. When did that happen to me?

Angel Eyes

I read a story today that Jeff Healey passed away over the weekend. He was only 41. I was trying to think back to how I first heard about him. A quick check on the internet and I had my answer. The movie “Road House” came out before his first album with the song “Angel Eyes.”

When I hear any Jeff Healey song I have one distinct memory. My sophomore year of college I was working in one of the dining halls. I always preferred the earlier shifts because a) I was much more of a morning person then and b) most other college kids weren’t so it wasn’t too busy. This became especially important on my Sunday morning shifts. This was easily the grossest job I ever had.

Sunday mornings from 8 until 11 I worked in the dish room. Let me paint a picture for you. The dish room in Harris Hall was down in the basement. Upstairs in the main dining areas was a dumbwaiter system that brought the trays down to the basement. Dealing with dirty dishes was one thing, and if it was as simple as that, then I would have been fine. The problem was with the few that decided to turn every meal into a science experiment. I won’t go in to details, but seriously, yuck!

So there I was, all alone in the basement of the dining hall on a Sunday morning. It was really slow and boring for most of the shift which was great. There was a boombox down there with me which was all that kept me from going mad or going to sleep. For whatever reason, I cannot think of a single artist other than Jeff Healey that I played while at work. I’m sure there must have been others, but I can’t recall anyone but him. Needless to say I knew the tape by heart. I even like his version of “While my guitar gently weeps” better than the original.

Here then are my top 5 Jeff Healey songs:

1. Something to Hold On To
2. I Think I Love You Too Much
3. Life Beyond the Sky
4. While My Guitar Gently Weeps
5. Angel Eyes