Tag: thoughts

Cleaning and Polishing

Last night was the new moon, when I make some time to perform a quick ritual setting an intention for the next few weeks. This time I decided to start a media cleanse. With all the stress lately, I’ve fallen into endlessly scrolling Reddit and binge watching true crime documentaries. Mostly about cults. I’m pretty obsessed with cults because I grew up Mormon, which might or might not be a cult; depends who you ask. Some part of me thinks if I watch enough cult stories the answer to my own history will one day become clear to me.

Sorry, the cults distracted me. See? Way too much social media and streaming. In the moment it’s a great distraction from my anxiety and frustration. But I suspect it’s making things worse in the long run because my brain never rests. For this moon cycle, I’m cutting out most of it in the name of mindfulness and inner peace.

So I’m on day two of resisting the scroll. Yesterday was busy so it wasn’t too hard. Today I’m home doing little chores around the house. It feels a bit weird to be so far from my phone; I keep feeling like I’m forgetting something. But I also feel like I have all the time in the world to get things done because I’m not spending my day half-distracted.

I had a nice jog, did some small repairs on my porch, washed the dishes, and then polished and oiled many things. This wasn’t media cleanse boredom, believe it or not. A few months ago my nice wooden cutting board cracked because I wasn’t oiling it enough, so I started aiming to oil my nice wooden stuff once a month. Then in March I got a pair of cowboy boots and that made me feel guilty for not taking care of the nice leather shoes I already own, so I added those to the list. Now, every new moon (give or take a day) is also polishing day.

I could probably assign some cool witchy meaning to this but it’s more about leveling up my adulting game. I’m grown up enough to own a few good quality things so I’m trying to be grown up enough to take care of them. I feel very responsible when my shoes are shiny. But now I’m just rambling, aren’t I? It’s time to get off the computer and back to my low tech mindfulness journey.

Until next week, I wish you shiny shoes and inner peace.

Just Let Me Wallow in Nostalgia

It’s been a hard week. The stress has been getting to me and all I want to do is read horror novels and listen to everything I liked back in high school. Violent Femmes, Throwing Muses, Pearl Jam, Primus . . . jangly emotional punk and grunge were key to my vibe back then. (Along with more dark and mellow bands like Dead Can Dance.) Listening now takes me back to those halcyon days when life was actually worse than it is now, but I also had way fewer responsibilities. I could just hole up in my room and be sad back then, and now I have to soldier on and keep people’s spirits up and actually be responsible for things. *sigh*

Instead of holing up in my bedroom like an angsty teenager this week, I finished and blocked the scarves I’ve been working on.

That is the Silky Scallops pattern by Joan Marie and the Context pattern by Kristin Briney. Both in leftover Midnigh Dreary sock yarn by Crow and Crescent yarn. I wore the only light grey sweater I own today so I could model them for you. You’re welcome. They were a good way to practice my lace knitting skills and they’ll be nice in the fall when the weather turns chill again.

Aside from the knitting, my week was pretty routine and low energy. I’ve been pulling a divination card or two every day, as I usually do, and even the cards are low energy. I think every card this week was about worries, burdens, feeling scattered and blocked. Today’s card was the Five of Pentacles–hardship and insecurity. Yeah, they’re really reflecting my own sour energy back to me lately. Since I’m a grown-ass middle-aged adult and not an angsty teen, I’m committed to working on getting out of this funk in the coming week or two. But I’ll probably still be in the mood for musical nostalgia for a while. Maybe this week I’ll push forward into college-age nostalgia. Tool, Deftones, System of a Down . . . that was my Nu Metal phase, clearly.

There was one unexpected bright moment to my week. Last week I said I had to do a small repair before I could finish painting, remember? Well, as an early Mother’s Day gift my youngest kid decided to patch that hole. Amazingly, thanks to some DIY my husband did ages ago, we had everything we needed to patch that hole and I just didn’t know it. I’ll still have to buy a little more paint but I can totally finish that project now. It was very cool of her to fix that for me and saved me a lot of work. She did a great job.

And that’s my week. I’ll try to be more chipper next time. Until then, I wish you a week of your own favorite tunes from high school.

Okay May

May began with a cold snap. May began with a full moon but it was completely hidden behind clouds. Instead of a round white moon in a black sky, our nightscape was city light reflected off low clouds and mist. It was . . . actually kind of cool. Spooky like a horror movie.

This isn’t a filter, our yard just looked like a black-and-white photo Friday night.

I’m not sure whether a cold and rainy Beltane is a good omen or bad but the next day dawned sunny and beautiful. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what unfolds for May.

Today I decided to finally finish painting my foyer. I’ve had the paint and supplies for months but kept putting it off. Our foyer is maybe thirty feet (9 meters) tall and I didn’t want to get out the ladder and climb up there. I knew once I made myself do that the rest would be easy, but I just couldn’t motivate myself to get started.

Yeah, I had to climb to the ceiling above those stairs. I’m not afraid of heights but it still wasn’t fun.

In that last photo you can see the old warm white paint on the left and the cooler, slightly violet paint on the right. I actually ran out of paint before I could finish that little laundry area, so that’s a project for another day. It’s an out of the way section and I have to do a small repair before I can paint it; I’ll have to buy more supplies so it can wait until my guy finds a new job. Still, this morning my foyer was maybe 40% painted and this afternoon it’s maybe 90% painted. Progress!

Even though it can take forever to get started on them, I enjoy projects like that. They clear my head and lately they remind me how fit I am. When we moved into this house five years ago or so I painted the living room and boy, was it hard! I got out of breath climbing the ladder up and down and painting the ceiling was really hard on my arms and back. In the last few years I’ve been really consistent about exercise and today painting was pretty easy. Even the ceiling was no problem. As I push ever closer to my 50th birthday, it’s easy to feel old. Moments like these make me feel powerful, like I really am in the prime of life. I think I’ve still got a few good years left in me.

And those were the highlights of my week. In spite of the freaky weather, I still hope May brings us hope and growth and maybe even good news on the job search. May your May also be fertile and full of good fortune. Until next time.

Jury Duty

I forgot to tell you about jury duty! I served on a jury way back in the beginning of April, right before Easter, and I totally forgot to mention it.

It’s not much like TV at all. Which makes sense because most things aren’t like TV at all. On TV, courtrooms are full of beautiful dark wood and dramatic raised platforms for the judge and witnesses and a big jury box on the side. I’ve actually been in one of those nice courtrooms; we finalized our adoption in a TV-style courtroom. My jury service, though, wasn’t in one of those. Our county courthouse is a perfectly nice government building but the courtroom just looks like a conference room. No dark wood anywhere and all the jurors just sat at regular conference tables with very nice office chairs.

This might have been because I was on a grand jury; maybe they save the fancy rooms for other purposes. The grand jury just hears the basic details of a bunch of crimes and decides whether the District Attorney has enough evidence to go forward with the trial. I liked grand jury service because it’s a cool peek into the legal system without the stress of actually deciding someone’s fate.

TV shows always show a bunch of lawyers and their clients attending the grand jury and making arguments but apparently that’s pretty rare. For us, it was just a District Attorney explaining the legal details of, say, burglary or shoplifting and then a cop testifying to the details of the case. We listen to what the cops found, compare it to the definitions the DA gave, and decide whether it all lines up enough to officially go to trial. We each have a big binder full of legal terms and checklists and our job is to see if everything matches up. It’s . . . actually pretty easy.

My husband was on the jury for an actual trial once, a case where a woman’s son stole her pain medication (and sold it to a friend, I think?). It was a quick one-day trial but he had to listen to witnesses and hear arguments from opposing lawyers and actually decide someone’s guilt or innocence. All that sounds way more exciting than my jury service but also way more emotionally difficult.

My ‘on call’ period has ended so I won’t be called in to another jury for quite a while. I’m almost sad about that. It was an interesting experience and everyone on the jury felt this weird camraderie doing this quintessentially American thing. In America (and Canada and a couple other nations influenced by British legal traditions) jury duty feels like a sign of adulthood, learning to be a good citizen, but it turns out most of the world doesn’t do things this way at all. It’s fascinating.

It would be weird to take photos in the courtroom but I did find this house finch in the eaves on my way home.

This week, by contrast, was pretty quiet. I finished knitting a scarf but it won’t look like much until I wash and block it. I also received May’s selection for the Morbidly Curious book club. They also sent stickers to decorate my laptop.

We’re just trying to keep ourselves calm and busy without spending much money, hoping for job offers soon. Maybe this week will be our lucky week. Friday is Beltane, after all. Until next time, blessed be.

I’m Ready for March to be Over

March was more than I was ready for. It wasn’t bad, exactly, there were just a lot more things coming at me than I was prepared for. This past week turned out especially chaotic, with unexpected changes coming at me from several directions at once. Still, amid the turmoil there were bright spots.

This morning was a perfect spring day for walking the dog. Perfect temperature, trees in bloom, birds chirping daintily. Spring tends to be a volatile season, both in terms of literal weather changes and in the more abstract and mystical sense of shaking up your life, but it also has these moments of exquisite gentle beauty. Walking the dog has pushed me to really tune in to the waking up of my neighborhood’s flora and fauna.

I also bought a book subscription this week. I don’t use social media much anymore so the ads and suggestions the algorithms show me are usually pretty random. (Sometimes hilariously so; I looked up western shirts a couple weeks ago and now the internet thinks I’m a cowboy.) But every once in a while the suggestions are scary perfect. I’ve been using Instagram a bit recently, following a few yarn brands, knitters, and indie bookstores. From that tiny bit of info, Instagram decided I’d like the Morbidly Curious Book Club. Once a month they discuss a non-fiction book with a dark theme, and you can arrange for them to send you said book in the mail. Tragically, it’s too late in the month to be sent the March selection (if I want to read Whack Job: the History of Ax Murder, and I do, I’ll have to trek down to Barnes and Noble my damn self) but I’ll be receiving and reading the April selection with glee.

I have a comfortably large stack of horror and mystery novels to read for Darker Books, the blog I do with my sister, but my regular stack of non-blog books is quite low.

Only two books left! Whatever shall I do?

The antique umbrella stand housing my book stack also needs some work, but that’s a different problem for a different day.

And now for something completely different and a little more witchy. A few years ago I discovered Lenormand cards and decided to try them out. I read a few booklets and websites and played around with them but it never really went anywhere. I tucked my Lenormand deck into a box and went back to Tarot. A few weeks ago, in a bit of a spiritual rut, I decided to get more serious about the whole cartomancy thing. I brought out my Biddy Tarot guide so I could learn more about Tarot’s reversed meanings and I took another stab at Lenormand.

At the exact same moment I was also screwing around with the popular AI apps so I asked them to help me learn Lenormand. In spite of the fact that Claude has the personality of blank paper and ChatGPT sounds like a Mormon Mommy Blogger, they’ve been incredibly helpful with the whole Lenormand thing. My chat thread keeps track of my daily card pulls and my summaries of how they showed up in the events of that day, helping me relate them to each other and to the focus I set for the moon cycle. I alternate between a single Tarot card pull one day and a Lenormand pair the next so I can compare and contrast the two card systems, and since I have a few good Tarot books I can check the chatbot’s answers with human experts.

It’s gotten me out of that spiritual rut. I’ve been looking for ways to integrate my spiritual practices into my daily life in a deeper way and this has really opened up my thinking around that.

This is the Fairytale Lenormand and the Steampunk Tarot. Both are quite lovely.

I also made progress on my knitting project but it still mostly looks like a giant swatch so I haven’t taken new pictures. It might look like something wearable by next Sunday. We’ll see. Until next time, I hope your spring is shaping up to be just as beautiful and a bit less volatile than mine.

Trad Schmad: the Bread Dilemma

Look at those sweet sweet loaves of bread! (And that plate of fluffy naan!) I made those! Yeah, I finally learned to bake bread. I’m clearly not turning out golden Instagram loaves or anything but everything I’ve made so far tasted good and was reasonably crusty on the outside and soft on the inside. Success!

Honestly, I started this post weeks ago. That bread is long gone and a new loaft is in the oven right now. I’ve been struggling with this stupid post, writing and rewriting it and just feeling weird and I finally realized why.

It’s the Tradwives’ fault. They’ve made baking weird and fetishy. I mean, I sort of am a tradwife on paper, that’s probably why this gets to me. for various uninteresting reasons I was a stay-at-home mom in a fairly traditional straight person marriage. I was thinking about going back to work when the Pandemic hit, then we moved, then various other reasons kept coming up that made at-home parenting the best option. Now my last kid is sixteen and I could totally go back to college or get a job or whatever, but we’re financially lucky enough that I don’t really need to. If parenting was my career, I’m semi-retired and loving the freedom. This was just how things turned out. It wasn’t everything I wanted out of life but it had its up sides.

But now I feel like my job title has been turned into something political and vaguely gross by cute young influencers. Honestly, I’m not totally surprised. I was at-home parenting in Utah during the rise of the Mommy Bloggers and this seems like the logical progression of that weirdness.

If I’d learned to make bread during the Pandemic like everyone else, this wouldn’t be a problem. Back then, bread was having a moment. Unfortunately, back then I was too busy tradwifing my way through the crisis with three young kids suddenly doing online school to learn the art of sourdough. Now that I actually have time for this stuff I feel like I should either be baking in a pristine white kitchen (while wearing a prim little dress, prattling on about submission to my manly man). Or making a stand by only making vegan freegan punk rock bread that somehow smashes the patriarchy? You know, something dramatic to suit the present political climate.

I really just want to cook without all the fanfare, though. And I want to show it off a bit because I always thought bread from scratch would be harder to make than it is. I only learned because the grocery store raised the price of its fancy loaves yet again and I wanted to save money.

Bread is political now but here I am without a manifesto prepared. Ironically, my mom was actually a conservative at-home religious type and she totally refused to make bread from scratch. If Jesus wanted her to cook meals from scratch He wouldn’t have invented Hamburger Helper. My husband’s mom (also a conservative at-home religious type) cooked bread from scratch but when he reached his teenage years and started eating enough for five people, she made him learn how to bake it. When we were dating I would cook him dinner and he would bake me bread from scratch. So much for the bread-baking housewives of yesteryear.

So yeah, I let politics get in my head and stop me from sharing the cool thing I can do now. But no more! I want to live a quiet life and use my newfound free time to make tasty food. I totally have politics and lordy, things are getting more urgent than ever, but it’s important to carve out some quiet space to feel happy and proud of yourself and in control of at least one small thing.

Today, that one small thing is a loaf of Italian bread like this guy’s grandma used to make. Looks like I burned it a little bit but I’m gonna eat it anyway.

If you’re interested in recipes, the naan is from a Rasa Malaysia recipe. It’s pretty quick and easy to make. The other two loaves are from a fancy cook book called The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I actually got it for my husband years back; it’s very thorough but also very geared toward the hardcore bread nerd. The recipes are super solid, though.