This one's for Harper.

Harper is a (relatively) new friend over on FB. She has a mordant wit and seems to think that I walk on water in my spare time.

She doesn't know me all that well, does she?

I am just your basic average middle aged Mormon convert with five birthed kids and three stepkids, and their spouses and significant or insignificant others, and eleven grandkids at this writing.  I've been a member of the LDS church since August 9, 1975. Almost 40 years. I just keep showing up, because it just keeps being true.

I've been married three times, divorced twice, widowed once. I'm a fiberholic. And a very careful chocoholic, now that I'm diabetic. Less chocolate but better quality, so the overall satisfaction level remains more or less constant.

I like to need to make things. My favorite thing to make, is love, in most of its permutations. But since Beloved is out of pocket for the next 40 years or so, I have to make love by making stuff. Food. Quilts. Sweaters. Order. Messes. I once wrote a poem that began (more or less) "I have the razor sharp mind of a Borgia, the libido of Catharine the Great, and the sensibilities of a 13th century nun. It makes for an uneasy combination."

In the nearly 20 years since I wrote that, the inner nun has become even more firmly in charge of the show. All that lovely energy which could wreak so much havoc if it were misused, needs to be used in ways that bless and not destroy. I work on lots of things, pretty much every waking moment, and some things take weeks to accomplish (the argyle design in my kitchen window, or one of the larger doll sweaters), while some things are quick (an hour or two for a quilt block). And things tend to get done in flurries.

So it's easy for people to think that I am this wickedly creative dervish who never sleeps. While I seem to need less sleep than a lot of people (five to six hours on a typical night), I am the mistress of dovetailing: fitting increments of progress into odd moments, which add up over the weeks and months and years into a lot of stuff (i.e., love) made.

Right now I am dozing off, bolt upright. And it's two and a half hours until I take my Metformin. And Mel and Squishy will be over in half an hour or so to investigate the "what is this thing?" I posted on FB last night. My brain thinks I should: (1) change into my painting clothes and touch up half a dozen oops spots throughout the house; (2) open up the first of four monthly quilt block kits and preshrink the fabric so my hands will have something to do while I wait for the AC dude on Friday; (3) find 500 new relatives on ancestry.com; (4) eat every last scrap of the coconut cake I made yesterday (no, wait, that's my stomach; sometimes it thinks it is running the show); (5) read all the back issues of the fitness magazine my health club has sent me that I haven't quite gotten around to; (6) hang some pictures; (7) make a huge salad as dessert for the black bean burrito I grabbed on the way home from work tonight; (8) pack tomorrow's lunch; (9) you get the idea.

Time to slice some cheese and grab a bottle of water and step away from the computer, if only for a moment.