Pretty and Real. And warm.

One of the blogs I used to read fairly regularly is Like Mother, Like Daughter, which is a mixture of domestic advice, crafting ideas, and reassuringly old-fashioned parenting guidance from two or maybe three generations of mothers and daughters (and therefore, possibly grandmothers) in one family.  Some members of the family home school; they garden assiduously and live fairly frugally, by which I mean that they make an effort to repair things that break, avoid buying new things, and make a lot of things themselves. They (or at least some of the team) are also very Catholic, more Catholic than my mother was, which I find interesting.  They have customs and faith traditions I have never heard of, which says some unflattering things about 1970s Catholic schooling, at least to my mind. I haven't read it frequently enough to sort out who the various names refer to, except for the darling baby, Pipo. It's worth paging through just to see his photos.

Anyway, the blog itself is beautifully designed, and they have a nice custom on Thursdays, called "Pretty, Happy, Funny, Real" where they publish photographs that fall into each of those categories. Some are decorations, some are of the garden, LOTS of them are of the aforementioned Pipo.  It's a nice 30-second distraction.  My photography skills are so poor, and my schedule is so chaotic at present that I could never undertake such a regular project but I do recommend checking it out.

But on the 'Pretty" and "Real" categories, here is something that caught my eye today:

Yarn Harlot (the worlds most famous knitting blogger - see my sidebar) has been on a mitten spree.  Aren't they lovely?  I have not attempted mittens but have made Lucy some gloves several years ago that matched her school uniform, and I made myself a set of fingerless gloves back in 2010. I want to try mittens, particularly I want to make some of the fabulous Latvian mittens that have been popular in knitting circles in the last few years. Like this:

or this:

Last year, Santa brought me (at my express direction) this book of Latvian knitting patterns.

It seems that Latvian girls traditionally knit themselves a hope chest of mittens, most of which were distributed to guests and helpers at their wedding. Some women in the book gave out over 80 pairs. Such beauty and generosity, and warm hands.

Aging gracefully, or not

A woman in my neighborhood bookclub jokingly recommended How Not To Act Old by Pamela Redmond Satran to us all a few months ago. I didn't know the book but found it cheap on half.com -- a site I thoroughly recommend if you like used books.  This book is a silly but occasionally pointed list of habits, manners of speech and basic idosyncrasies that those of us over 40 probably have, which the author claims are out of step with many people under 35.

So what, you may say, and you're right. But it is true that if you have, say, a boss who is noticeably younger than you, or if you work closely with younger "peers", and I use that word deliberately, it is useful to know how not to give yourself away, so to speak.  How not to lose that important peerness.

Some of it is funny and other parts are a little crude but I have to admit that I have taken several recommendations on board. For example, I no longer wear reading glasses outside the house. I have progressive contacts, and very trendy -- almost too trendy, actually -- blue framed metallic glasses, that correct my mild astigmatism on the top, and allow me to read everything on the bottom. The progressive lenses hide the reading bit. The author points out that it is just too tempting to wear readers on the end of your nose and look over the top, which just looks awful. No one under 40 needs to do that. And if you're coloring your hair and going to yoga and joking around about Jenna Marbles (ha! did you get that reference?) with your work pals, you do not want to spoil everything by looking like Mrs Claus at an odd moment.

Here are some other useful recommendations:

• Learn to type on your smart phone with your thumbs and make sure you are wearing your contacts so you can read your txt msgs without holding the screen at arms length
• Stop leaving voicemails; no one listens to them. They just check call history and if they want to talk to you they call you back. Or txt instead
• Don't talk about health problems.
• Don't talk at length about your children; talk about yourself. This is difficult when you're flipping between your school parent friends (with whom you always talk about children) and your younger work friends, but I think it's important. Many of my nurse friends at UT have kids, but we don't discuss them. I learned this when Jess txted me at the hospital to tell me the school bus had crashed (no one was hurt-- and it actually rear-ended the disabled kids' bus). I was half laughing and half horrified and related this to several nurses sitting around me, whom I then realized were much closer in age to my children than they were to me. They found the whole business hilarious.

Here are a few other funny admonitions I try to remember:

• Don't be  unable to find your cell phone because you put it in a different place each time
• Don't yell into your cell phone (Jess complains that I do this)
• Enough with the Jane Austen worship- guilty.
• Don't start conversations with strangers - well, thankfully compared to most Texans, I am positively reserved.

The book also lists things that are now "old" but used to be young, like Harley Davidsons, dinner parties, dried flowers in the home, acrylic nails, Paul McCartney, and the expression "surfing the net". 

Like many cute books, this one was originally a blog and you can still read it at http://www.hownottoactold.com/. So there is quite a lot of filler in it to flesh it out to a book of 200+ pages and 185 lists. But I have vowed to stop dating myself by pointing out, for example, that I was already married and living in London when the Berlin wall came down; that I covered Margaret Thatcher's resignation for a regional newspaper;  or what the IT industry was like before the internet. None of that is necessary information; it's just something I used to contribute to suitable conversations, because I'm amazed myself at how fast things have changed. Not anymore.

Oh! and I am on Twitter, you know: amyberkleyellis. You can follow me. And if Jessica reminds me how to do it, I'll follow you back.

Run pony, run pony

We are off to Fred's first piano lesson this afternoon. Great excitement.

I believe he is the most musical of my three children. He sings all the time, can sing Frere Jacques in a round and seems to pick up melodies with hardly any effort. He plays on our Yamaha Clavinova whenever he can, and picks out tunes. I have waited until he was 5 to start, because I didn't think he could sit still long enough to make it worthwhile. Then I was lucky enough to make friends with a local Suzuki teacher, who told me very sternly that I Was Late. She was half joking, but only half.

We had a meeting/interview at her house before Christmas and although he was a little shy at first, Fred enjoyed himself and did everything she asked him to.  We have been dutifully listening to our "Twinkle Twinkle" variations on CD and and he is learning to identify notes on the keyboard.

You know who I'm talking about?

I have a terrible memory for movies and celebrities' names. Even book titles and authors slip away shortly after I've read them.  Here's an honest example, and  I'll have to google this to find her at the end of the paragraph. There is a popular woman author who has written a dozen or more contemporary books about women and families (I think). I've read at least two of them. Her name has an A in it, but it's not Anne Rice (vampires - my sister read all of these) or Anita Shreve or Anita Brookner (I'm always mixing these two up in my head. I like Anita Brookner's brooding English writing very much.) The woman I'm trying to remember wrote a book about couples who adopt a Chinese orphan, and have various troubles adapting to it. I remember that it was very good and that I was the first person to check it out of Molesey Library.

OK, it took me about 5 minutes to find her; in the end I had to google "American woman novelists Ann..." but I found Anne Tyler on the list. The book was Digging to America, published in 2006. But it really annoys me that I can't remember the name of the book or the author. I remember the story and where I read it and my pictures of the action, but the names slide away.

This failing is particularly annoying when I'm trying to argue with someone, or at least make a point, and the evidence I need -- the examples, authors, films, musicians -- has slipped out of my grasp. Often it happens in a moment, as I'm beginning the sentence, and by the time I get to the point, I've lost my data.  My aural memory is good; I can remember pieces of music, or even sometimes the way the missing name sounds, the number of syllables it contains and what consonant it begins with.

Earlier today I was groping for the name of Darius Rucker, (very cool country singer, former lead of Hootie and the Blowfish, who had a rebirth in the industry and reinvented himself as a country singer). I kept saying, Desmond Morris (British anthropologist and author of the 1970s classic Man Watching) instead.

If this is an early sign of dementia, I would like to know now.

Back to normal, I hope.

I took all the decorations down yesterday, with help from Fred and Jessica. This is a Good Year for holiday decorations, in that I had lots of time to sort through all six -- count 'em, 6 -- boxes and organize them so that I know where everything is. One box for lights, indoor and outdoor, even though we didn't do any outdoor lighting this year. One box for decorations that do not coordinate with next year's theme, now marked "Archive - checked 1/2012 -AE - Box 6 of 6".  This will only seem excessive to those of you who have not unloaded an international shipping container, or four.

 Christmas in the red boxes; Easter in the pink box; Halloween in the orange boxes. Lovely.

I also did what I do on good years, and wrote myself a letter for next Christmas. I put it in an envelope, wrote a reminder on the front to open it on November 1, 2012, and buried it in the bottom of my In Tray.  In it, I told myself sternly to get started on holiday preparations early. "Make mince pies in November",  I said. "Buy more candles", "Remember you have two spare presents in Box 1" and "Preserves were good idea for teacher presents".  I used to get really excited and make lists of knitted gifts I was going to start on in June, but I am more realistic now.

It makes me feel a little apprehensive this year too, hoping that nothing untoward will have happened by the time I open it. By November, Fred will be in school, Lucy in college, and I hope I will be a good third of the way through a masters degree. But things might not go so smoothly. I had a big birthday in November -- not a big number, just big to me. Big in that I am a little amazed by the number 47. Since I've been a nurse, I've become all too aware of what the far side of the hill (as in "over the hill") looks like. I'm not there yet by some way, but I can see it.  In gloomier 47 moments, I think all we can hope for is to avoid disaster, in health, housing or finances. But fortunately, most gloomy moments are interrupted by someone sticking a YouTube video under my nose, "Mum, you've got to see this", or by someone else presenting me with a drawing of a dog, sort of, with "I ruff you" scrawled on it in large stick letters.

In good 47 moments, I remember that I'm old enough to know what I want. I'm old enough to skim shamelessly through bookclub selections that aren't worth reading; to listen to the parenting trials of my younger BabyMama friends with patience and detachment, reminding myself that I've been at this business since they were in high school. I'm old enough to recognize my own flight responses, which are particularly strong after a hot dry summer when all my plants died, and do not mean that we need to move to Los Angeles the minute Jessica graduates from high school. And I'm pathetic enough to take pleasure in six labeled boxes of Christmas decorations stacked in order of access priority waiting for next November.