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Sacrament of the Scrubbing Bubbles

Unsurprisingly, this never caught on….

To be honest, other than the text and the mustaches, there was very little I had to do here; we can compliment/blame Alice Cordelia Morse for her lovely watercolor and gouache work.  It’s archived at the Smithsonian, as an image from the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. I’m reasonably sure that the skull-like blotches around the cross were really meant as shorthand for cherub faces.  But scrubbing bubbles [wha-hoo!] are much more entertaining.

We’ve had a houseguest that did not arrive [or leave] on four feet.  So perhaps that’s why cleaning has been on my mind?

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Experiment #4

Points if you know the song lyrics, of course.  This picture is unrelated, in the sense that I knew I wanted to post the image before the title for the post made an awkward shift from a single word to something with more [literal] resonance..

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With minor apologies to classic poetry…

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Objects in the mirror

…are not remotely accurate…

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New arrivals

At the stroke of ten, on Groundhog’s Day

In swirled the flock of robins

They

Startled starlings, scattered squirr’ls,

They

Stalked around the raspberry canes,

They

Perched and preened while

Peering about — was it time?

Was it, was it,

Is it time?

They

Must have flown all Imbolc night

Though sleet and ice

And here they are, and there, and over there, so probably

This

This is as good a time as any.

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Schnee-snippet

Perhaps today is best considered as light comedy, at least for me — I realize that the snow is Quite a Serious Matter elsewhere — I’d got the steps swept again, got the defrost going on Monster, and was cleverly sweeping off the top of Monster using a long-handled brush, after carefully putting my satchel with ID and wallet back in the house so I wouldn’t dump snow into it while working.

Less cleverly, I forgot to retrieve that satchel of essentials before hieing off into the snowstorm, and therefore had to track back 30+ miles after discovering the error.

it’s rather like the forest creature that digs itself a burrow beneath a tree, carefully lines it with leaves and fur, and then, just as it’s turning around to enter that nice dry shelter, gets flumphed upon by a cascade of snow from the upper branches.  !!

Ah well.

It is pretty.

Now my thoughts turn to how much bustling around the house I need to do to merit a big mug of hot cocoa with some bracing bit of booze in it….

In the meantime, I see there are more of you out there reading this — Don’t be shy then; say hello!

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Errors in Expectations

Oh, the best laid-plans… For instance, when you’re running a meeting and it turns out:

• You printed out the wrong agenda
• Two of your key attendees have to leave one hour earlier than expected
• A rapid decision on a complicated topic has to be made while both these attendees are able to participate
• Another of the key attendees cannot be at the meeting at all

At that point, you have to juggle the Order of the Day pretty severely, and as one string gets pulled from the warp, a bit of the weft goes wonky, and the conversations loop and swirl like water currents splashing over rocks in a mountain stream.

Or maybe it’s a bit more like THIS…

Whatever the metaphor, the meeting was effective.  Work gots done. People got to have their say.  People who had to leave, didn’t feel left out, and the meeting still ended 30 minutes early.

But ’twas mighty hard on the notetaker.

“Why not organize the agenda in the order you actually plan to say things?” asks said notetaker, who is a reasonable, organized person.

I pointed out that some of the docket-juggling was due to the needs of the moment that I couldn’t have planned for, but I get the feeling that wasn’t viewed as sufficient justification.  Honestly, my goal is to get enough committees functioning that I just ask them to give me reports of what they’ve accomplished, and I don’t have to provide both the structure and the content for these sessions….but it’s a work in progress, and most of the group understands this.

<sigh>

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There will be a time….

…when people in fair Elsinore will complain of the heat, of the humidity, of the vapors….

This is not that time.  Not remotely.

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Tying up the year…

I was hesitating over that title, because maybe the end of 2014 is more about setting things free…but then decided that the idea of “Let it Go” had been a trifle overused in the last few months, and who needs that earwurm again? [Confession: I like the song, but overplay and over-commodification make it grating.]

Here: look at more tatting, instead!

No, I haven’t a clue what to do with them.  I am tat-less in addition to tactless, apparently.  But let me get back on-task now… In the last hours I have of this year, there are a few things that Must Be Done, in no particular order:

• Charitable contributions:
  • Doctors without Borders, Heifer, alma mater, local arts, clothing donations, etc.
• Bills
• End of year report to employer
• Buy milk
• Work on music
• Clear my desk
• Closet-culling
• Acknowledge past traditions I do not practice for the tying up of other things….

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