A Photo To Shock my Mother-in-Law*

First I apologize to my most faithful readers, you few, you precious few, I know who you are, ( and I do appreciate you) that I am often not very amusing nor have I posted very often. I see these really lovely blogs out there that have near daily adventures fully documented with brilliant photos and original art and the dear heart of the blogger clearly displayed on veritable sleeves. But that isn't who you are related to...or in the case of my determined friends, friends with. Some blogs just have a near constant flow of recipes, tales of joy, tales of woe, travels, advice, you name it... I say this in admiration, but me, I clam up and besides that, I work.

So it has been a week since I sat down to share a thing but here I am and I'm ready to go beyond vulnerable. I have in fact uploaded a truly shocking photo...only those of you who know me rather well will understand the outrageous nature of what is about to be displayed.

If I knew how to embed music I would ask Mark to do a Tommy Emmanuel drum roll on the face of the new guitar he just built...but you just imagine it, okay? Here it is...Ta Da...

An empty ironing basket. The basket actually has a bottom. I was so touched to see it that I not only took this picture, I popped the photo onto the "paint" program on my computer and wrote on the bottom of the basket.

This basket which is capable of hiding articles of clothing for entire seasons, this basket which is sometimes spilling over, this basket that is eyed by cats as having more cush potential than a king size memory foam mattress is actually empty because I ironed to the very bottom on Saturday morning, the 10th day of the 10th month in the year 2009.

I am sure this portends of something. I was always the student that had to clean my desk before I would sit down and write the essay that was due. So am I going to sew something? I don't mind ironing pieces of cloth for quilts or some small do-able project. Maybe I am going to write something or maybe now I can just feel like I can garden more.

In the garden the goal is to fill the baskets up...of course then they too need to be emptied and then one has to cook...but skip that subject for now. I am not going to get into it, sauces and pestos and, no never mind the soup for now.

But, now that it is October, the tomatoes (spell check had to help me out on pluralizing this word, and yet for such small things people make fun of past POTUSes and VPOTUSes? I should be vulnerable in such a world? ) are finally ripening. Coastal Living!

And we are getting another crop of strawberries too.

Up north, in days of old, so to speak, we had chickens, live chickens; chickens with names and personalities and duties, like eating bugs in our garden. Here I have but two chickens, they were on sale when Long's Drug Store was yielding to the initials company that bought it. They didn't have any hens, just these white roosters, but in the case of ceramic chickens, the roosters lay just as many eggs as the hens. It would be nice to really have chickens, but serious housing would need to be constructed first given the local wild population which includes numerous animals that would make a chicken coop a regular visit...think raccoons, skunks, possums, bob cats and California mountain lions. So for now, these are all the chicks we've got.

No promises now, but if you leave me a little word that you did come by and enjoy the odd post or two, I may be back a little sooner. I'm not ready to do one of those one post for every 365 days a year challenges or anything, but just maybe...well, it isn't that I don't write, you see, it's just that I can't quite pop it all up public like, it may not be fitting.  But now that I have shown you that I straightened out every wrinkle I owned, showed the bottom of the basket, well maybe it will be easier to iron things smoothly in other realms as well...or not.

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* The only other times all my ironing has been done is when it was done by the most kind mother of my dear husband who not only loves to do kind things for others, she actually enjoys ironing. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that I can always think of so many other things to do instead, unless I need the clothes and then there is probably something else I could wear or it's not that wrinkled, is it?

okay that's it...

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