The Hermits' Rest

Coincidentally, Coincidences Are Everywhere

I’m worn out after six hours of meetings, wrangling with new computer peripherals, then a fun meeting later. I’m not used to so much sitting and headphone wearing. I’ve gotta get back in the groove of work!

Carlton says he’s had a hard day of barking anytime a vehicle approached.

I’ll just share a story of serendipity and coincidence from this morning. I’m capable of that. So, bright and early, my son and I drove in his darned nice 2001 work truck to our nearest real city, Temple. It has big box stores, so it’s a city.

We headed to Lowe’s to look for some tile to make a border around our screened porch floor, since the leftover travertine from the inside of the house didn’t quite cover it. The quest failed. The big box store had ZERO floor tile that wasn’t porcelain. What the heck? We wanted something natural.

We left there and made the convoluted u-turn required to get back to the pitiful Temple Mall, where there’s a fairly new Floor and Decor store. We figured with “floor” in the name, they’d have more variety. And they did! I’d forgotten how much I love looking at wall tile, but I steeled myself to only look at flooring.

We did, indeed, locate natural stone in a large size that my son could cut to the required size. As I was dwelling on the color of the stone, I turned my eyes to the left. Wow, what I saw looked familiar. It was the exact travertine in the exact shapes we already were using.

What a coincidence! They had it.

But it was more than a coincidence. I realized that the stone was in the same spot in the store displayed exactly the same way it was in 2014, when our contractor and I picked the flooring. The store in Austin had the same layout!

Then we got the stuff to lay the tile and headed to checkout. The clerk asked if we had a phone number on file. I didn’t think so, but gave her Lee’s number. She said, yes, it was there all right, under Ruben Construction? I said sure, as we both laughed as we realized the last thing I’d bought there was that same tile!

What a coincidence. That certainly made the morning fun.

I got home an hour before my Pacific Time work started, too. Not bad but it made for a long (but good) day.

And now I sleep! I’ll be more pithy tomorrow, perhaps.

Best Last First Day on a Job Possible

Today I started what I hope will be my last full-time job ever (I did say that about my previous job that ended so oddly). Today was so encouraging that I keep wanting to tell someone, but I’ve already told my whole family, so it’s your turn, reader-folk. My new job started off splendidly.

Even the civilized 11am start time made me happy. No more 7am meetings for me! Pacific Time is nice. I’ll occasionally have a rather late meeting, but I’ll probably work 9:30-5:30, which is very nice. I’ll be able to have morning time to do things that require concentration. Great.

I met two coworkers today, and I enjoyed their positive attitudes, their eagerness to get my input, and their openness. The company seems to have a very open and honest culture. I’ll even know what products they’re making! I think we can get good things done and end up with productive and organized teams and projects. I’m stoked. (I love this initial part of any job where it’s all possibilities and few roadblocks.)

The company culture is refreshing and positive. They will even let me participate in their Employee Resource Groups. I’ll enjoy making contributions in this new place for the next few months! Let’s see what tomorrow brings when I start going to meetings. And when my laptop arrives so I can use my new email address and access the SharePoint site. Whee!

Oh how I’ve missed a work laptop. photo from Pexels.

Other good news? Look at these precious babies! They’re growing! Soon we can shut the porch door!

And my son made good progress laying out the floor on the screened porch using what was leftover from building our house. I’m glad we kept it safe all this time! We don’t have quite enough for the whole floor, so tomorrow we’re going to pick out a border tile. I hope we can find something that goes well with this natural stone that’s also on sale.

We’ll see. Being so optimistic feels good but weird!

I hope something positive happened to you today. We all need it.

Making Time to Waste Time

How do you waste the most time every day?

I’d like to start out by asserting that one person’s idea of wasting time is an other’s idea of fun, education, or necessary downtime. I’m not here to judge anyone for what they do with their limited lifespan.

As I’m someone who counts dragonflies, I have my own weird time fillers.

Most of my life, I’ve spent most of my time doing things I felt were important or useful. Note that I find meditating, reading, and engaging with friends on social media to be useful. Connections with the earth, learning, and creating community are vital!

Lately, during my brief but restorative retirement, I’ve done a few things that might be “wasting” time, which I define as time spent not contributing to my health or wellbeing. One is watching television shows and not also doing something productive, like knitting. I’ve actually sat down and watched multiple episodes of shows that are just entertainment. Right now I’ve been watching “The Gilded Age,” just to enjoy the sets and writing. Perhaps I’m learning a bit about fashion, culture, and history of New York City when they were still building Central Park.

And “Star Trek: Discovery” takes my mind off the news and reminds me how I got to be so darned woke. That’s one woke show in an already woke franchise. We are about done with that one.

So, there is some use to that one. However, I keep letting myself be drawn into Facebook Reels. These are usually embarrassing and stupid. For every occasional cute dog thing, I get caught up in dozens of clickbait, nasty, or plain silly videos that waste my time. I am going to have to get stronger to stop my random clicking. It’s embarrassing.

A final thing I regret spending time on is worrying about the consequences of wars and how I can survive in authoritarian world. These are things I cannot control.

Otherwise, I enjoy what I do, especially when I can rest or relax. Starting tomorrow there will be less of that! I’m interested to see what my new job turns out to entail!

Corned Beef Hash

Which food, when you eat it, instantly transports you to childhood?

My mom made it in the electric frying pan she cooked everything in. She made little wells in the canned hash and put eggs in them. Two for each of us. I ate it like it was ambrosia.

This is the exact recipe. Even uses canned hash.

I make that dish for myself sometimes. Not often. But I think of my little nuclear family and all the cheap meals we thought were special.

Mom did some good things.

Book Report: Demon Copperhead

I’ve been trying to escape by reading novels. The joke’s on me, because Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver (2022) is not an escape. It’s more of a descent into hell with a really nice guy. Many of you have already read this book, but I’d been holding onto it for a while, thinking it would be a hard one to get through. I was correct about that, but it doesn’t mean the book wasn’t worth reading. Not when one of our greatest living novelists wrote it and it’s about a topic that has touched so many families, even those of us on the outside of the opioid epidemic.

I loved realizing that the book was based on the story of David Copperfield (get it, Demon Copperhead…), which was another book that was so depressing I had a hard time dragging my hyper-sensitive empath eyes over its words. Dickens really knew is sad-but-true sh**. Knowing that ahead of time, I knew where the arc of the story of the main character, who goes by Demon Copperhead, was heading. I just didn’t want to go there with him for a while, so I had to set the book aside as soon as the Big Bad Drugs came out.

A lot of the book was like visiting a new world (at least a respite from White Evangelical Christian World), because for better or worse, I have very limited exposure to addictive substances or illegal drugs, other than alcohol. Thanks to growing up with my mom (who was addicted to legal substances of tobacco, alcohol, and prescription drugs), I didn’t want to have anything to do with anything that might possibly mess with my brain. So, I partook of no weed, no shrooms, no LSD, and none of the other stuff.

It’s not that I didn’t know any people who enjoyed their substances of choice. I mean, I was a teen in the 70s, for goodness sake. I just wasn’t immersed in the culture that went with it. Yes, I managed to have fun anyway.

The world of foster care is another one I don’t have direct experience with, but I gained a lot of sympathy for friends and family who lived through some of the unpleasant aspects of the system. And I’m so grateful for the good foster parents and successful people who made it through.

Thankfully, Kingsolver has a knack for describing how things feel from the point of view of the person experiencing them, which means I learned about drugs from the user’s point of view, where things that might have scared me were just part of Demon’s daily life. Kingsolver also makes most characters in the book sympathetic – you can see how they got to be in the mess they were in. I liked her description of having sex from the man’s point of view, too, since it’s obviously not something I’m familiar with.

One thing that got me through the hard parts of Demon Copperhead was that sometimes I could just read the words and enjoy how well crafted they were, especially when Demon is observing the world around him. That boy had the artist’s eye, thanks to Kingsolver!

In summary, you probably should read this book. It will be eye-opening to those of you who’ve never lived in rural America or spent time in the poor parts of Appalachia. For me, the overwhelming feeling I got was how grateful I am so have only lived on the edges of the world in this book, and how much more empathy I have for those thrown into it by no fault of their own.

My First Crush…

Write about your first crush.

I’m only answering this question because I didn’t have any great topics today. So I’ll tell you about my dreamy seventh-grade crush. There are no photos of him to share since I lost my yearbook. Here’s an approximation.

Also a teen crush of mine, though it turns out David Cassidy was nicer.

Kevin Murray was a year ahead of me in school but we were in Spanish class together. I thought he was both hilarious and incredibly cool, because he owned rock and roll albums. I didn’t have a record player that would play them yet.

He picked on me a lot, but it didn’t bother me because I was a new person in junior high and was one of the popular kids in the academic track. We all picked on each other and had nicknames for each other. Man, seventh grade was GREAT. We had young, hip teachers and spent a lot of time writing plays based on Star Trek and publishing the school newsletter on mimeo paper. Mmm, that smell.

Back to Kevin. I thought that long (for 1971) red hair, those green eyes, and the freckles made him look like a sexy leprechaun. Or something. Anyway, he showed me he liked me by randomly showing up on my street and pretending to steal my new, very cool, red-white-and-blue Murray Eliminator bike (same name as him, so obviously it was his).

This is the general idea, but wrong color.

I showed I liked him by riding my bike around his house in case he might come outside, and drooling over his parents’ incredible blue Citröen car.

I mean, that’s as cool as my bike, right?

We had a fun summer of innocent pre-teen flirtation. My dad found us very funny, pretending to be annoyed by each other. He kept telling me “that boy likes you.”

Then I was moved to South Florida despite my protests, and that was it. No email, no texting, no Facebook, so no contact. If letters were exchanged, I don’t recall. No, I do not need to find him. I’ll just treasure my dim memories.

I pined for Kevin until the summer after ninth grade when I met the boy I’d really swoon for. That’s another story.

Weird postscript: by the time my younger son, an actual Irish boy, was a toddler, I realized who he looked like. Eww.

My son as a toddler. Red hair, green eyes, freckles.

On the other hand, I now have an idea of what adult Kevin would have looked like, though I don’t think he grew to be 6’3”.

About Your Clothing Choices

You can blame this post on my friend Jennifer, who complained (in a funny way) today about how some kinds of clothing just don’t work for her. She mentioned how high-waisted pants don’t fit well on her body shape, and that she finds shirts with longer hems in back to be unflattering as well. She pointed out that mid-rise jeans actually hit her midriff, since she is short-waisted. (See below for her original)

AI made me these high-waisted example pants.

You can also blame my thinking about other people’s clothing hang-ups and preferences to watching the new show “Wear Whatever the F You Want” with Clinton Kelly and Stacy London, who now help people find a wardrobe that THEY like, not what the stylists want them to wear. I have found a few of the choices not to my taste, but then, I wasn’t the one wearing them!

I may not like it, but I don’t have to wear it. Photo by Genaro Servu00edn on Pexels.com

Our clothing reflects a lot about how we want the world to perceive us as well as about how we perceive ourselves. No wonder I hear so many proclamations among my friends about what they’d NEVER wear. My stepmother told me repeatedly how she didn’t like “shark hems” on tops (which I wore a lot of back when she was at her peak). My sister was adamantly against short sleeves that came to above the elbows on women “of a certain age” (for me they interfere with my ability to enjoy my flappy area in its wingiest).

I have friends who never wear pants, others who never wear dresses, those who love leggings and those who hate them, and then there’s all the pants “rules” like letting your undies show above your pants, wearing skinny or wide legs, jeans or no jeans, rips or no rips, etc.

Love them or leave them! Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels.com

Of course, the sane voice inside our heads will tell us that people can wear whatever the f they want, and our issues with their choices are just that, our issues. That’s absolutely true! I was wondering, though, where did my own clothing prejudices come from? One answer is my mother. She was not fond of tattoos, liked long painted fingernails, and enjoyed wearing clothing that “matched.” The other main answer is the times I grew up in. I wanted to be a hippie when I grew up, so my love of tie dye, jeans, and long braids is pretty predictable. My dislike of polyester double-knit pant suits and (for the male-type folks) leisure suits derives from the same thing: I still wanted to be a hippie, and adults were trying to dress me like an old Florida retiree.

I’m truly enjoying learning about other people’s fashion likes and dislikes because they tell so much about each of us. I loved reading Jennifer’s fashion rant, and would equally love to hear yours. What do you just love and what drives you to distraction when you see it or are forced to wear it? As an incentive, I’ll share some of my irrational fashion opinions, as long as you remember that I am very fond of many, many people who make choices different from mine. I enjoy the variety. So here you go:

I love to wear t-shirts and jeans, with comfy sneakers on my feet.
I like tie-dye a lot.
I am uncomfortable wearing dresses, but okay with tunics and leggings.
I am not fond of leggings with short tops.
Dress pants, especially polyester ones, make me feel like I’m pretending to be fancy.
Tucking your shirt into your pants, especially just the front, is ick for me. I know I have to do it for horse shows, with a belt that beautifully accentuates the belly I have hated since childhood, which is totally my own self-image issue and I acknowledge that.
I like loud prints and bright colors. Pastels make me look kind of ill.
I love turquoise jewelery.
The fact that one navy blue item of clothing never quite matches the color of other navy blue items annoys me.
I love hats, a lot.
I don’t like body conscious attire that shows every feature of one’s body. I’m glad other people are comfortable wearing it; I’m just not up for it. I like things that skim the body and are loose for ease of movement.
I don’t like crocs. I do like Birkenstocks. That makes me inconsistent.
The only piercings I’m comfortable with are pierced ears, which is better than my parents, who didn’t like that and made me wait until I was 18 to get my ears pierced. I sort of like a nose piercing in a nostril, but the ones in the septum bother me more than they should, and I have no idea why.
I don’t have tattoos and don’t like lots of the ones I see, especially random poorly drawn images. Some I find incredibly beautiful, just not for me.
I cannot stand thong underwear or underwire bras.
I don’t like clothing with hate speech or hateful insignia on them. I like peace signs, mandalas, and Sanskrit om characters, though. Hippie thing.
Apparel emblazoned with luxury brand logos isn’t my style. I do seem to be wearing a Carhart t-shirt, however.

There is a mosquito in my office, so I’m going to stop typing. I’d love to hear some of your clothing opinions.

So apparently “high-waisted” pants are the latest trend in womens’ clothing. That’s the last thing short women like me need. Ha. I’ve been wearing high-waisted pants since before they were popular — for like 5 decades. At not-quite-5′ tall anymore, I’ve always been what they call “short-waisted”. Meaning if I put on regular womens pants, the waist comes up to just under my bust. I used to roll down the waist band of pants a few times so the crotch wouldn’t hang down at my knees. Give me some “high-waisted” pants and they’d probably come up to my neck. For me, “mid-rise” pants, which supposedly come up to just below the belly button on non-short women, come up to just above my belly button. Just about right.
And another thing. I hate those shirts with what they call a shirt-tail hem. Those things are about 2″ lower in the back and on someone short like me, those come down below my butt and look ridiculous. Ugh. I hate them.
Rants over. For now.

My Favorite Thing about Me

What’s your favorite thing about yourself?

I didn’t have too much to write about today, other than that horses are cute and I have a new favorite light fixture. So, let’s find out what my favorite thing about me might be.

But first, look at the fun Apache and Rylie (probably not spelled right) had today during warmups.

Okay, so, answer the question, Suna. And don’t say you like something except for this that or the other. No self put-downs allowed.

Oh, second, hey look at this light fixture. It looks like planets made of rock crystals.

I used to always say my favorite thing about myself were my feet. They were not too big or small, medium width, and had nice toes. Now they are more mature feet with mature person issues. So, nope, it’s not my feet.

Sorry, feet, you also always have fire ant bites.

All right. I’ll refrain from pointing out the obvious negatives for this, as instructed, and declare my favorite thing about myself is how I can empathize with others, care deeply about people who don’t care back, and always see our commonalities as humans. That boils down to one concept but I don’t have the right word for it.

Take a seat while I add unnecessary explanations, as I tend to do.

Note that I can now set boundaries, so my character feature is one I can now embrace without fear of hurting myself. I’m not going to run out and embrace the toxic people in my life, but I can try to understand them and care, from a distance.

They can’t hurt me, even though I may appear vulnerable, just like today’s maize calligrapher fly can’t sting me, even though it looks like a wasp.

Super Sensitive Suna, as I labeled myself on Facebook today, can take the occasional sadness and hurt that comes from all that caring, but it’s worth it. I just have to expect to have the occasional down periods. It’s a small price to pay to keep cherishing my favorite thing about myself.

What? I Can’t Hear You!

I’m taking a break from Facebook, since the fallout on a post I thought was not too controversial turned out to incite strong partisan feelings among my friends. I respect their rights to debate, and find areas of agreement with each, but I’m so damned hypersensitive that I had to take a break. I also snoozed a few very nice people for a while. So, I’m no longer listening to the fallout until I’m up to it again. I do want to hear all views, but I also want to remain mentally stable.

But I can still blog and write on my Substack, which is where I rant. I’ve been trying to listen to birdsong my porch or birding slab, but I’m thwarted. There is an incessant throbbing sound echoing through the trees. It fills most of the spectrogram on Merlin Bird ID.

The faint rhythmic lines are a Cardinal.

It’s cicadas. I can hardly hear myself think for them. Once they start up around 9 am, they’re in all the trees every minute unless it rains. My best birding the past couple of days has been right after a storm, when birds have a feeding frenzy thanks to flying insects, and I guess the cicadas need to dry off.

Only the loudest and closest birds pierce through the wall of cicada sound. I do get a lot of House Sparrow chirps. That’s because their nest is above me (to the right; I’m not putting chairs under their extra-decorative nests.

Mrs Sparrow, who alternates with Mr Sparrow in insect deliveries.

These mofos are everywhere. When not feeding, they’re sitting around pooping on our outdoor furniture, grills (which are covered), etc. They’re not native, so we could dispose of them, but nope. I just make sure they stay out of the new screened porch.

Speaking of our lovely new porch, the Barn Swallow eggs haven’t even hatched yet, so who knows when we will be able to shut the door. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t quite so dang law abiding and could remove the nests.

I do have a bit better luck with birds on my walks, where there are some areas a bit farther from the cicadas. Plus, there are always good old eyeballs for spotting birds! Yesterday I found a Mississippi Kite and today a Green Heron.

Blurry, but I could tell what it was from colors and call.

So, between traipsing through mud to tend to horses and listening to birds, my last free week before my consulting gig starts is full. I also keep crocheting, and now April and May are connected on my temperature blanket, and June is caught up. The nice KnitPicks lady said that if I do not get yarn by ten working days to call them rather than patiently waiting a month like I did. I am now warned.

I’ll leave you with bugs and flowers. Please send healing thoughts to everyone who’s affected by world events, and listen hard, even when it’s difficult to hear.

It’s too Painful

Living in a place where two incompatible world views exist and where each world view sees the other as filled with stupid, hateful liars has become almost too painful for me. I hate being able to see how strongly each faction sees itself as right and true and the others as blind.

I don’t think my own beliefs and values even matter. Those of us who want to live in harmony with our friends and loved ones, all of them, will be the first to be caught in the crossfire when it all falls to pieces. We’re just expendable wimps.

It’s like cats versus dogs, and I’m the rabbit they both want to eliminate.

Today people I admire were vilifying people like me for daring to express their beliefs in public. These weren’t extremists, just who I thought were regular people with different views from the other people I admire.

It’s painful to witness. Time for me to retreat and try to regroup. I won’t heal completely or forget how frightened people act towards the “other” but I need to regain my incentive for participating in the world outside my little ranch.

Later, haters.