Yes here she is – the woman that all little girls in the 60s wanted to grow up to be.  Or at least the woman their mothers wanted them to be.  Perfect woman, perfect job, and she owes it all to her typing skills.  The lovely nails are thanks to Underwood’s patented half-moon keys which allowed her long lovely nails to slip unharmed between the keys.  She is clear-skinned and clear-eyed, a woman on her way to the (desk outside) the top.  She is a secretary.  Joanie Holloway in the flesh.

Like every other good 70s girl, I took “typewriting” in high school because we all knew a girl couldn’t get a job without typing and shorthand. It was also good to know how to cook and clean so that after you found what you were REALLY looking for at the office, you could settle down and cook and clean for him.   I’m a terrible cook, a lackadaisical housekeeper, barely passed shorthand, but boy could I type!  When I got out of high school and started looking for a job I could type over a hundred words per minute on a manual typewriter.

My first job with a typewriter installed at my desk was at Traveller’s Insurance Company.  There were about 50 “girls” in one room filled with typewriters and perfume.  They were IBM selectrics (the machines, not the girls) – the new cream of the crop.

What a beautiful machine!  I know it doesn’t look like much now, but it was a wonder.  I can close my eyes and hear the little dampened “tik” sound the keys made.  Installed above the platen was a little ball that rotated to select the letters instead of the clunky “piano type” keys.  Want to change the font or even the language?  Just change the ball.

It was the love of this machine that kept me at Traveller’s so long.  I managed to make it three days before I gathered up my tooled leather purse and fringed poncho and went to tell the supervisor that I was quitting.  When she asked why, I told her that my soul was being suffocated and if I stayed any longer I would be leaping from the top of the building singing “Pave Paradise”.  She gave me the stink-eye and told me that there were plenty of girls waiting for my job.

I’m still good at typing.  More than 80 wpm with arthritis. 

Still not good at office work or taking instructions.  Still all right brain and no left.  Still runs with scissors.

But sometimes I miss that Selectric.

www.amctv.com/MadMen

…and its cousins

and even:

Some are accidentally funny.

What?

And some are actually improved by graffiti:

These are called “Editing by Graffiti” and there are some hilarious ones here although not all are suitable for children or the easily offended.

Recently on a long trip home from Houston (and EVERY trip home from Houston is long), I stopped in at a store I’d been passing for years without visiting.  It was nice, lots of gardening stuff both indoors and out.  But there were signs posted everywhere (badly made on a computer I might add), and something about the tone of them put me off.

The first one especially.

Now, I understand the sentiment.  In an indoor/outdoor kind of store, especially one with lots of “outdoor” , a lot of those little rubber  snakes, turtles and frogs are going to be abandoned in birdbaths and in the arms of giant cement gorillas.  The destruction of merchandise is no better than the stealing of it.

But something about the “your children MAY NOT” part just rubbed me wrong.   At least that one said please.

There was this one:

Lighten up, guys.  How about:  “Sorry it’s raining!  Please feel free to purchase one of our umbrellas for your walk through our lovely outdoor area”.  Perhaps they should hire me to make signs.  I could certainly make them look better.

This one was pretty straightforward.

Don’t worry – the chair was ugly anyway.

But even the old

is better than this:

Guess it’s all in the tone.

How is your tone?  Is it more “thanks a lot!” or “thanks a LOT”.

What you say is so often much less important than how you say it.

I didn’t buy a thing at the store with the snotty signs.

Two of the things I really hate are reading and following instructions.

So both my fabric art and my gardening are catch-as-catch-can to use a phrase I also love.  Sometimes they work out and sometimes they dont.

This didn’t:  It’s a bag made from a green wool sweater that I bought for 35 cents, felted, and had a lot of fun making.  But it was no fun to carry because wool is itchy, everything gathered at the bottom, and I’m too old to carry a hippie purse.

I like it though – it’s odd in the same  way that I am and so I kept other pieces of felted wool and wool roving in it.

So one day while gardening and looking for things to hang in my “Something from Nothing” garden, I had an idea.

I took the old purse and cut it in half, leaving the pretty flowers, the grey wool rounded bottom,  and the button..

then put in the pot, added plant,

soaked the entire thing,

and voila’…

Catch as catch can.

Forty-four is not so cold, but it feels cold when it’s been in the 80s for weeks.  As I covered tender little plants for the night I thought about how we would wish for some of these chilly breezes in August when it is 100 over and over… and over.

But the weather is like happiness.  You can’t store it up for the hard times.  You can remember the feel of your child’s soft, sweet cheek sleeping against your shoulder, but you can’t have it back.

Plants will die in their season, as will we.  Live your happiness today.

This film then by the female Japanese director Hasako Matsui should be as fascinating as its subject, but it’s not.  It’s poetic to the point of being stifled.  A large portion of Leonie’s life was lived in Japan, but we see only tiny pictures of this beautiful country.  Her son was one of the most noted sculptures of the age, and yet we see only small flashes of his creativity.  Emily Mortimer is very good, but the movie is so much focussed on her that we do really don’t get to even form an opinion of the others in her life.  Shido Nakamura as Yone Noguchi was fascinating, but the child actors are all pretty terrible.

I was, to say the least, disappointed.  It’s the sort of film about which my husband would say  ”I wanted to kill myself three times”.  Could have been so much more!

Was it yesterday afternoon that we worked on the project where she had to make the game?  Wasn’t that when it bothered her to no end that the small wooden tokens we used as game pieces were not all the same size?  I assured that it would add to the “charm” of the project and she went to get her instruction sheet to show me that “charm” was not mentioned anywhere.

Was it last night that I tucked her into bed and tried very hard not to roll my eyes at her nighttime routine:  story, then her hand lotion, then her chapsticks, then position her bear exactly right, then flip her hair up above her head on the pillow, then fix her eyepillow, then – and only then could I tuck her in and kiss her goodnight, but not too big a smack because that would necessitate more chapstick.

No – that couldn’t have been yesterday.  Because yesterday I sat across from my baby girl and the wedding planner at the chapel.

She’s getting married in 19 days at the Brownstone Wedding Chapel in Weatherford.

Her need for getting things right has paid off. She had a big binder with labels like “flowers”, “food”, “invitation lists” and more.  She had an answer for every single question the planner asked and few questions of her own.  She was the opposite of a bridezilla – cool, calm, in-charge but open to other ideas.  I just sat there.  In wonder.

Emily’s fiancee Tony is a  wonderful, sweet young man whom we are proud to have as part of the family.  They have not one but two houses, two jobs, friends, two dogs, a cat and a lot of love.

He’s lucky to have her, I hope he knows that.  And who knows, maybe that tucking-in routine will change.

I love you Emilita.

And the other side:

Only a couple of concerns:  the red bowl sitting on the red box is wrong; they’re too close to being the same size.  What is needed is a big red bowl.  Hmmmm… I may need a trip to an antique store dern it.  Also I should close that cabinet door.  I’ll try to get to that today.

Here is the bar makeover:  Before it was just this n that.

On my shopping trip I stopped in at Lowe’s to check out the dead, dying, and clearance plants.  I bought 6 “assorted gardens” for $1.60 each – often when one plant in the “garden” is going, they dump the rest.  Some of these I used to make:

a terrarium.  This was a water dispenser with a broken lid which had originally been over my kitchen sink.  Then I cleaned up the others and repotted some and now the bar is a plant bar:

Hopefully they will get enough light there.  I’m thinking of spray painting the metal bowls that they are in, but I’m not sure.  I’m going to live with it a while first.

So there you have it.  Altogether I spent $78, but that includes two vases and a hamper that I bought and didn’t use.  So now I have two vases and a hamper to decorate with somewhere else!  Soon I will be moving my daughter’s piano into my house which will necessitate…  The $78 art niche makeover!

Here we are before:

Kitchen cabinets shown before $78 makeover

Here we are when I THOUGHT I was finished:

And here we are today:

Going backwards you say?  Oh, yes I am.  It was the shelf that bothered me.  Although my friend Virginia Conner liked it, I hated seeing the bottoms of things.

So instead I added…

…a chair.  Much better.  But now the chair cries out for…

…the globe.  And the books.  And I’ve been wanting to do something with decoupaging some old maps I had so I did…

…the yardstick, which is tool small to see.  Now I can see I will be forced to decoupage something else.  Darn.

Annnnyway – here we are now:

Nope.  Something is still not right.  I thought the hamper was going to be great, but it’s too heavy.

Back to the drawing board.  More later…

This is the display area of my kitchen cabinet before.  Not horrible, and yet not what I wanted either.

I love a few of these things (the globe, the cows), and some of it is up there because I had no place else to put it; the cake cover for instance – where DO people keep those things? And there are some things that I love but that don’t belong there like the big enamelware breadbox that was in my late husband’s chuckwagon. Of course there are all the things that are too small, coffee cans, pitchers, etc.  What to do with them? They’re great things, things that I have collected through the years and that go with the color pallet, but they’re too small to work here.

Kitchen

Putting the bread in the actual bread box would help, but more about that later.  There’s also the bar which is never used as a bar but rather as a horizontal filing cabinet and a place to put the apples.

So – where to begin?   I did a lot of reading, and there is one consensus: pick the things you like and want to see every day, use a consistent color pallete, and use things that are size-consistent with your space.  There’s a great blog on SAS Interiors here.  I also got great inspiration from Thrifty Decor Chick.  She does a great step-by-step.

I began with an empty pallete, no small feat for me.  I have always liked a busy interior – when the Mr. and I bought this house with the help of the world’s best realtor Felicia Tornabene Peters, she told me she knew I would love it because it had lots of room for my “tschotskis”.  She was right; unfortunately none of my tschotskis seemed big enough for the art niches built into the tops of the walls.

Add to that the fact that in the kitchen the area slopes down from about four feet at the apex of the point to a tiny triangle above the window.

So – I took everything down and began again.

Next to pick my favorite things.  That was easy.  The globe has to go in.  I’ve loved that globe since I bought it at a junk store for $5 many years ago.  It lights up, but there is no outlet above the cabinets, so we’ll leave it for now.  Also the cows

Those cows were a gift from a friend of mine who died tragically much too young.  They remind me of when the Fort Worth Stock Show was still called the “Fat Stock Show”.  Can’t say fat anymore, can we?

I left the quilt above the pantry because it’s too small for anything else and because I like  it.  So now what to add?  Large, people – we need large.

I bought a basket at a local antique store for $15 at Sugar n Spice, my favorite antique store in Granbury.  It was perfect.  The color was just right.  Turquoise is funny; what some people call turquoise just looks blue to me.  I prefer to err on the side of green, so maybe what I like is really aqua instead of turquoise, but I quibble. My shopping trip about town also took me to New 2 U, an awesome consignment store where I got these metal vases for $6.25 each!  Consignment stores are especially wonderful if you’re willing to wait for them to be marked down.  A coat of white paint and voila!

Much  more my style.  And certainly a better size fit for my area. Two cans of Valspar spray paint for metal brings my total to $41.42

First I added only the basket.

That worked!

 The second thing I added was a garden shelf from my backyard, on which I put the things I liked most from the smaller items.  I put aside part of the coffee cans and only included the reds for that pop of color amidst the turquoise and yellow.  Hmmm… maybe I like it.  But I must have:

The globe, surrounded by the books I had in reds and greens.  (Yes of COURSE I have books because because of their color – don’t you?)  Add…

 The garden hanging, the metal vase (repainted) and two bowls from Sugar n Spice at $3.75 each, plus red bowls from Target and there you have it.

Tomorrow – the other side and the (gulp) bar.

I don’t know what the library grandmother’s excuse was.

I make my living as a ventriloquist.   My comedy is gentle and apolitical.  So after a recent library show when a grandmotherly type approached me and said “You are VERY talented, but …” I wasn’t too concerned. Maybe she didn’t like the way I told “The Cobbler’s Elves” or the fact that I told a fairy tale at all. Hey, it’s Texas – it happens.

No. What she said to me was “You are VERY talented but… you lost me with the Obama thing”.

I furrowed my brow and thought:   The Obama thing? What Obama thing? I honestly had to think about it. Oh yes… I DID say his name. Here’s how that goes:

When introducing my show, I first tell the children my name is “Nancy Burks Worcester NOT Nancy Burps Rooster”, and they laugh. Then I say, “Now we have to go over the rules because I promised your mom and dad, I promised your librarian, I promised your teachers, and I promised (pause) Barack Obama”. They laugh. I wait for the laughter and then say “No – I’m just kidding. I don’t know Barack Obama”.

I blinked at the library grandmother. “You were insulted because I said the name of the President of theUnited States?”

She sniffed. “He’s trying to dismantle the entire country.”

That was the entire “Obama thing”. I didn’t shout “Obama-Biden 2012!” or “Keep Hope Alive!” I didn’t put my hand over my heart or call him “our dear leader”.  I didn’t speak of him in glowing terms.  I didn’t speak of him at all.   I SAID HIS NAME. That’s what she objected to. I SAID HIS NAME.

I couldn’t quite bring myself to look at her. I was afraid I would laugh or that my head would spin around. I just kept dismantling my sound system and trying to remain calm.

“Well, you know – ” I said. “I’ve been doing this a long time. A few years ago the joke was the same except that I said George Bush”.

“Okay,” she said. “That makes me feel a little better.” I was glad she felt better, but now  I felt worse. “Excuse me,”  I said. “But I just can’t imagine why you would have an issue with someone saying the name of the President in a public library”.

“He’s not even an American,” she said.  “I can’t STAND him.  When they made all those precious little schoolchildren chant ‘Obama, Obama, Obama’, I was sick to my stomach, and you know what chanting leads to”.

At that point I was completely mystified.  What children?  What chanting?  And exactly what does chanting lead to? Self-awareness? Spiritual enlightenment? Scabies? I couldn’t imagine. I excused myself and went to tell the librarian what had happened. She had not seen the whole show, and I didn’t want her to think I had passed out political literature or led any chanting.

This is not a political commentary.  Everyone has their opinion and should vote their conscience.  This is a commentary on hatred – such seething hatred that we can’t even stand to hear a person’s name spoken aloud.  That kind of hatred is poisonous; for me and you, for the library grandmother, and for our country.

I think James has it right. Sometimes what we should do is just shout at people “NO TALKING!”