Middle aged bicycle geek

I can see that the season is turning more towards spring.  I gave serious consideration to riding my bike to  the office even though the yard still has two feet of snow in it.  The spandex clad herds of  thin tired ram handled athletic wheelheads have not yet showed on the streets to irritate the drivers who seem to think of them as fair game. 
I am not sure just what it is about the spandex wheelhead that seems so absurd to me.  I personally wouldn't be caught dead in a pair of bicycle shorts until they make some that look a lot more like a pair of jeans.  My mental visual of myself  never included my rear assemblage in spandex.

If it comes down to it my own bicycling equipment must give people pause.  I tend to retrofit my equipment with an eye to practical use and the result can have connotations  I didn't consider.  I showed a friend my helmet, and as she looked at it she began cackling and singing the flying monkey theme from The Wizard of Oz.
I hadn't thought of that

Thursday's Child

This is Thursday's child. 
He is the Swordsman's best friend.  He comes from tough beginnings and has challenges that could be daunting without his particular combination of grit, intelligence and artistic imagination.
Thursday's Child came into our lives when he came home with the Swordsman, who simply informed me that "He needs to talk to you mom." 
He did, and I did, and over time I came to think very highly of him. 
Thursdays child is much quieter than either of my sprats, who have the ability to be quite outrageous in a performance artist sort of way. Both the Earstwhile child and the Swordsman play to the audience with theater and aplomb, Thursday's child takes an observer stand and watches.

 When the Swordsman decided to play ninja at the high school, Thursday's child was the slightly taken aback audience. 
At the ComiCon he watched and observed and learned and thought, while The Swordsman and the Earstwhile child interacted and performed.
He moves at a much slower pace than you average young man , choosing his time and making his choices  slowly because he has some health problems that can throw up roadblocks.   He is in college now, and headed for a computer career he thinks, Plenty of time to re-think as he gets further along. 
Thursday's child's family comes from so far outside normal  that He thinks of me and my family as so normal  that they are  staid and somewhat stuffy.  I have never felt so conventional as when talking with him about the process of daily living.  I have never felt more uncool and June Cleaverish.
Once he was trying to explain his dad to me. 
He said, " Have you ever been on the bus, and sitting in the last open seat, looking forward to a quiet ride with the seat to yourself?  Then a guy gets on.  He is fat, and a little smelly, and not too clean, and then he sits in the seat next to you and he is just WAY too friendly. Well, My dad is the Fat Man On The Bus."
Ok.  Good to know.
I didn't teach him to knit.  He doesn't want to know.  I did show him that knitting can be much cooler and more art oriented than he had ever imagined. 
He is a good guy going places in his own inimitable way.

imaginary answers to ordinary questions

So what is it that you actually do?
I get this question a lot.  Especially from male engineers.  I have a hard time answering it too.  The shortest answer  ( I am a holistic practitioner. I work out of a medical office) has not sufficed to satisfy curiosity.  I try again.
"I use CranialSacral therapy plus hypnotherapy plus techniques from brain integration to help people  who have problems with headache, chronic pain, back pain and residual problems from accidents and injury to feel better and to heal more."
"Oh.  So how do you do that?"
"I stick a bone in my nose just here, See?  and then I take a knife about two feet long and chase all the evil spirits that cause everything from toothache to halitosis over the horizon."
"Oh.  Does it work?"
"Better than you could ever imagine."
"Oh." silence for a minute.  " So what do you do realy?"

Letters From Aunt Ruth

Dear Aunt Ruth,
It has been five years since your passing.   I still think of you daily and send a little prayer your direction.

The Boys are grown mostly, and James is a certified chef.  Chris had some hard times and is still working away at getting his degree.

I spent a lot of time this year catagorizing your letters to me and mom and dad so of course I spent more time reading them than the task at hand.  Which was to put them into page protectors in order from 1976 to 2004 when you penned your last Christmas card before the stroke felled you.  Time has not dimmed their sparkle, and I must tell you how much I gained from that regular  correspondence.

I learned to write really well from you, and I thank you daily.  I gained the habit of observing and filing away small pictures and adventures to describe to you and make you laugh. 
That brings me to a sort of ongoing endeavor that you would love.

 I now have a Blog where I try to do the same sort of writing.  I will be show casing your letters there every so often.  Thought you would like to know.
Give my love to uncle Bill and uncle Jim,

Love, Cathy  (click on the pages to embiggen them)

metamorphsis

I started a hat a few days ago.  I thought it was a hat anyway.  Apparently the yarn had other ideas for what it was going to become.  The part that was supposed to be the sides ended up like a plate or something elizabethen to go about a neck. The part that began as a hat now greets the world as a nice little neck frill.  Decorative, but not hattish. 
Sometimes you have to go with what happens and I really had no problem letting the yarn decide.    In a day or two I will model my new balaclava with the extra thick ear part.  Bicycling in the spring around here feels a lot like riding into a wall of wet cement.   It is something about the wind.  I despise the wind in my ears, and you can't wear a hat under a bicycle helmet. 

Ok It is finished and I tried it on.   Somehow wearing this emphasizes just how much I am beginning to resemble Mom. 
In observing the manner of things I am fishing out of my head and putting up here, I am beginning to find some order.   I don't intend to talk about it until it sorts itself out a little more.  Then again order may just lurk on the horizon and never show up here at all.


this is Mom

brain rewire in progress, aoeui

I went down to visit my parents, mostly my dad because I see mom much more regularly.  I told him about the blog and suggested that it would save some catchup time if he read  up on it first.   The first thing he wanted to know was how relearning the keyboard was going. 
To be truthful, it's going slow. 
Bless him, he understood very well  why I would embark on something  that so seriously challenges  a well developed groove in my brain, to say nothing of inconvenincing myself. 
This is good. It is hard to explain the attraction when most people have never even tried brushing their teeth with their non dominant hand.
You see, it changes how you think and opens new pathways in your brain.  I like keeping my options open.  Having to struggle to do this helps keep me humble.  It helps me be patient with people learning new things, especially things I find easy.
Rewriting a brain path  takes time.  It takes persistance.  In the end it does pay off in strength and flexibility.
Meantime here I sit.
aoeui snthd aoeui snthd aoeui snthd  ',.pylrcgf ',.py lrcgf   phooo.

re formatting my brain again

Did you ever think about why we use the keyboard set up that we do?  It was formulated with the original manual typewriters as a way to slow people down and keep the keys from tangling. 
It takes a whole lot of dexterity to learn the system and get any speed at all.    I just converted my keyboard to Dvorak and am relearning the new keys.  My brain is twisted into a shape like a yarn skein. Even so I am typing faster and more accurately than I did at first  with the old one.   If you are wondering why on earth I would put myself through this,  It is because this kind of  work helps keep your brain flexible and able to learn new things more easily.  Meantime, typing is s-l-o-w.  There was an unbelievable  amount of cat hair reveiled  when I popped the keys to re-arrange them.  middle line a o e u i s n t h d