Is *that* why I have five lovely, lively, intelligent daughters?
[And now I have that old, old love song stuck in my head. By the light, by the light, by the light of the silvery moon, not the sun but the moon, I love to spoon, etc.]
This has been one of those weeks where nothing major happened, other than my keeping my temper, so mostly you’re going to get tidbits and random synaptic firings.
I think maybe I let people down in the Halloween department this year. Ordinarily, I am the first in the office to show up in costume. This year I just could not get inspired. Halloween 2002, Brother Stilts and I won the best adult costume awards at our church’s Trunk or Treat party. We went as ourselves. He was a pirate-ish vampire, and I wore my Renaissance costume with a properly modest blouse beneath my bodice. I got a really good scrapbook page out of that, and we had so much fun unnerving the other adults. The kids all just thought we were cool. The adults weren’t quite sure where the costumes ended and the real “us” began.
Which maybe was the point.
I thought maybe I’d attach some of my sheep to the back of my shirt and go as Little Bo Peep. But then I remembered my friend who came last year as an old lady with a lost dog wedged in her derriere.
So I fastened MS3 with my vintage black walnut Brittany crochet hook, and I printed up this:
Across the top I wrote, Je m’appelle Thérèse Defarge. And across the bottom I wrote, Á bas le roi! Á bas les Evrémondes!
And I pinned it to my shawl, and I went as Mme. Defarge. Two of my attorneys [age-mates of mine] got it immediately. I despair of the younger generation, however.
And on to a different topic: passive-aggression. It’s something I fight in myself. I had a slight tendency toward it as a child, but I honed and polished it while married to the children’s father. [He was the king and past master of it; I was the queen. Feints within feints within feints. Dance around the unpleasant topics. Don’t come out and ask for what you really want, because the answer is probably “no”.]
It has subtly tainted my relationship with God. I often hesitate to ask Him for what I want, even though I know He stands ready to give me everything I need, and much of what I want [the stuff that would be good for me, including those lovely blessings that sometimes come not-in-disguise]. I have no clue how often I should be asking God to send me a righteous companion. At what point does “this is important to me, but not urgent, just reminding you that it would be nice to have a little help” become nagging? I hesitate to ask him to bless my finances, to help me be a better manager. I have learned never, ever to pray for patience, because then stuff happens that I have to be patient *about*.
But I digress. Occasionally, passive aggression really is the right tool for the job. Take my evening commute, for example. The on-ramp to the freeway starts out as two lanes and narrows to one. Most nights there are two or three cars in each lane, and we interlace politely and merge smoothly with the faster traffic. Some nights, like last night, one lane or the other is full and stopped, and the other lane is empty almost to the point where it peters out. And there will be some hotshot who sees an opportunity to get ahead of the herd, barreling up the hill and horning in.
Sometimes I do what I did a week ago Friday. I saw her decide to accelerate, and as my lane crept forward, I edged to the right so that I was squarely in the middle of the lane-and-a-quarter. There were 25 or 30 of us good guys, waiting our turn, and then this bozoette. And I thought, “Honey, you do not have a flashing light on top of your car, you are not any more important than the rest of us, and I’m going to put a stop to it.”
That’s me; braking for truth and righteousness [parody of the Young Women’s theme].
Last night one of the good brethren in the stake greeted me with mock obeisance before the meeting. I laughed and said, “The only man in the stake who treats me like that, and you’re married!” Which cracked all of us up. Then he said, “Well, Sister, if nobody has claimed you in the eternities, I’ll come find you.”
And thankfully my filter kicked in, because it would have been Not Nice to have said, “Oh H#ll no, there are worse things than being single.” Now, he’s a good guy, and I love his wife, and our families go back almost 15 years. But we would make each other miserable if our fellowship were anything other than simple, chaste friendship.
I told LittleBit about it on the way to stake conference this morning. She thought it was pretty funny. And so when he repeated the mock obeisance before this morning’s meeting, she hugged him and asked in feigned innocence, “Does this mean you’re going to be my new daddy?”
I just roared with laughter and told him, “You started it.” Yeah, and that’s how rumors get started, too, but I think my gale of laughter probably nipped them in the bud.
I do not like the new skirt. I discovered, once I got to church this morning, that the underskirt has slits on each side up to *here*. Am I irritated enough to just take it back to the store tomorrow for credit, or do I want to sit down with a needle and thread and stitch together about 80% of the length of each slit?
On the other hand, I am liking Sabbath Scarf #2 very much.
This is a little blurry, but you can get a good feel for the pattern.
1 comment:
I really like that scarf, too. Where did you get the pattern for it? I am looking for some new scarf patterns.
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