CLUTTER!

I was afraid I’d find out I golf as poorly with my new clubs as I did with my old ones, that it isn’t my awful old clubs, it’s me. Reality: My game is improved. I’m still not good at it, but I hit farther, and straighter, with my new clubs. It’s also nice to have a new bag with bright, shining clubs that all match in it. I especially like my driver. The head of it is almost as big as my face, but the club is very lightweight. I’m going to have to go to a driving range and try out each club to see how each performs differently. I have three hybrids that take the place of some irons, but the numbers on them are different, seventeen, twenty-two and twenty-five. I’ll take notes so I don’t forget.

I called AmTrak on Monday and connected with a wonderful agent who was not in the least intimidated or irritated with the route a friend and I want to take next year from Saint Paul to Seattle to Sacramento to Salt Lake City, with stops along the way to do book signings. She figured out the fare both with a rail pass and "point to point" – every place we want to get off calls for a separate ticket when we get back on for the next stop – and it’s hundreds of dollars cheaper point to point. That surprised me. But we’re booked, so I guess it’s really going to happen. Look for us in your town, if you’re on our route, in June of 2010. Scheduled stops are: Fargo, Wolf Point, Cut Bank, East Glacier Park, Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Reno, and Salt Lake City. Whew!

We moved into our current residence in June of 2007, from a four-level townhouse to an apartment. I moved from an office made from a nice-size bedroom to a windowless den more than a third smaller in size. So it wasn’t just because I didn’t want to move everything stored in my office to our new place, I couldn’t bring it along. Once I realized that, it was amazing what I decided I could do without. It’s also amazingly liberating to throw things away; it’s like putting down a heavy load you’ve been carrying for a long while. You add to it a little bit at a time so you don’t notice how huge it’s gotten. Then you start to clear things out, toss this and that and it’s almost like an avalanche. "If I don’t have to keep this, how can I possibly think I need to keep that?" Whoo-hoo!

What's interesting is that, two years later, I don't hear myself saying, "I wish I hadn't thrown that out" about anything!

I do wish I were more the sort of person who is very organized. I’m married to that sort of person, and it’s the biggest thing I’m envious of. People visiting us for the first time have no problem telling which office belongs to whom. One has everything put away in neat folders properly labeled or stacked on shelves in an orderly fashion. The other has stacks of paper not filed (every so often I’ll get angry at myself and will catch up on my filing, but in less than a week, there’s another stack built up), shelves cluttered haphazardly, and bags of partly-finished projects (at least they’re in bags, not left out to collect dust) piled all over the place. I like to think my office looks friendly and lived in; my husband would go mad trying to work in such disorder.

Maybe that’s what it is. I can live in more disorder than some people; less than others. I have at least two friends who can live with more disorder than I can stand, and many friends who absolutely must have a lot more order than I need. It’s probably something like, "the time it takes to complete a given task expands to fill the time allotted to it." The clutter piles up to every person’s ability to stand it. I used to think that if I had more room, so there was a place to put everything, I’d be more orderly. But now I think I’m actually a little neater when the space I’m given is severely limited.

I also like the notion already expressed in these pages that every so often we should pretend we’re going to move and go through our collections with that in mind.

BASKETWEAVE KNITTING

Excuse me for barging in early, but I want to post two pictures and I'm not sure I can do it without help -- and my web mistress is NOT an early riser.

Another thing I ran into at the Quilt Show in Duluth two weekends ago was a yarn booth. I don’t quilt, so you’d think I’d be safe from buying things at a quilt show, wouldn’t you? But noooooo. The woman at the booth was knitting a scarf in this fascinating pattern, and showed me how it was done. It didn’t seem terribly difficult, and it was a very interesting pattern. So I bought a skein of yarn, as that was the only way to acquire the instructions for knitting it. She calls the pattern Basketweave and it took me several tries with scrap yarn to acquire the skill. I’m still not terrific at it -- you can see a couple of errors in the pattern -- but I’ve started the scarf on the yarn I bought which is a fabulous blend of silk, wool and mohair, and a gorgeous color. One thing I didn’t realize until I was well into it is that the backside is a completely different pattern. The pictures here show the front and the back – amazingly different.

We have a bed that is very high off the floor – I literally have to take a flying leap to get up into bed at night. There are drawers in the bottom of it, so you can’t get underneath. I knew I’d had at least one pair of reading glasses fall between the head of the mattress and the headboard onto the floor, so when a paperback I’d been reading went missing, I took a flashlight and peered into the narrow space and sure enough, there it was, out of reach. I pushed the mattress out of the way and squeezed my forearm down between the box spring and headboard and still couldn’t reach the floor. I resorted to a pair of kitchen tongs and came up with the book and three (!) pairs of reading glasses. I didn’t realize that’s where they’d all gotten to. On the other hand, it makes me feel competent to have figured out how to get them back without dismantling the bed.

We’re going up to Cass County this coming Sunday, will be there till Wednesday evening. Look for a report next Wednesday on loons, a German POW camp, the source of the Mississippi River, and whatever else I can learn in aid of Buttons and Bones, the book I’m currently writing.

I took a one-hour lesson in driving, as that is my weakest part of my golf game. I think I came away more confused than helped, but we’ll see next time I play. Meanwhile, I’m going to go hit a bucket or two of balls to see if any of it has matured in my head since the lesson. Whoever thought hitting a ball with a stick could be so complicated?

Speaking of slow learning, I think I’m slowly starting to get the hang of writing a synopsis for film as opposed to a book. Think visually, that’s the ticket. But oh, how much easier is that said than done!

Speaking of visually, I think my eyes have at last started to improve.

A friend and I are planning a long train trip around this time next year and she came over this past weekend and we got out the schedules and maps and timetables and started plotting the stops we hope to make along the way: Fargo, Wolf Point, Cut Bank, East Glacier Park, Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Reno, and Salt Lake City. We figure we’ll be on the rails something over two weeks. If any of you are from one of these places, I hope you’ll come and see us wherever we're appearing, a library, a bookstore, or a needlework shop!