Crippled by Perfection.

Our family has had this inside joke for years.  We call someone "crippled by perfection."  It means a person who is so concerned that things won't be just so when a project is done that they never start it.  Now that I have my eye out for it, this is something I see people do all the time.  It is definitely an issue for me at times.

I recently had to teach a lesson at church and I can't remember anything else about it (post-traumatic stress), except this quote:  "Anything worth doing is worth doing well....FALSE.   Anything worth doing well is worth doing badly at first."

I hate making or doing something that I feel is substandard.  If I decide to play around with a new skill, I will spend hours, days, weeks researching it.  I'll obsess about which way is the best way to do whatever it is, weighing options, trying to avoid failure.  In the meantime, what have I accomplished?  Not much.  At some point, abstract knowledge isn't enough.

When I was a kid, I would watch my Grandma make pies.  She was a master of the art of pie-making.  She learned through trial by fire.  Back in the day, the threshing crews would travel around and spend a few days at each farm, threshing all the wheat.   This meant the farm wife had a huge crew of hungry men to cook for each day.  In addition to a huge spread of good home cooked everything, she would make several different kinds of pie, because hungry men like pie.

I would sit and watch her sifting a pile of flour onto the cutting board, adding salt and then cutting shortening into it.  She'd add just the right amount of ice water, toss it all together and roll it out into a smooth perfect disc.  Every pie tin was filled with dough and given a delicate fluted edge.  Each move was easy and swift, because she'd been doing it so long that she didn't have to think about the mechanics anymore.  It looked effortless. I didn't ever try to help her, but I felt like I knew how to make pie.  After all, I had watched hundreds of pies be made, right?

I didn't try to make pie myself until after Grandma wasn't around to advise me.  When I did try,  oh, was that a rude awakening.  I made crumbly pellets that wouldn't roll out.  I made sticky gummy messes.  I realized that I had not, in fact, been lucky enough to learn pie skills by simple osmosis.  Alas.

I need to give myself a break and realize that learning is as admirable as perfection.  It is comforting to think that more knowledge will guarantee a more favorable result, but past a certain point there is no substitute for actual, real-world experience.  I'm trying to remember this, even if it's just as simple as thinking "What can I do in fifteen minutes that I've been meaning to do forever?"

This weekend I printed, framed, and hung two pictures on our family picture wall, and started painting some board to put up for backsplash in the kitchen.  They are not perfect, but done is better than perfect.

Writing Every Day

It's time for me to face the fact that I'll be far more successful journaling online than I have ever been on paper.  As part of my continuing effort to do SOMETHING that will be here tomorrow, to show for today, I'm making it a goal to blog daily.  I apologize in advance for over-sharing and run-on sentences.  Possibly also for excessive use of parenthesis and dashes and ellipses.

We had friends over for supper tonight and they were kind enough to bring the food, so all we had to do was be presentable.  We failed  a bit.  The air conditioner/furnace went out on us today, and we spent all day scrambling to find a temporary fix. I should mention that it has been in the very upper 90s for a week and will be at least that hot for a week more.

 Our guests arrived just as Toby was trying to rinse the dirt out of a borrowed AC window unit and dropped it, slashing his fingers on the sheet metal housing.  Our dining room table was covered with debris from when he brought the beast into the house, only to realize it was dirty and take it out again.

I was standing in the bathroom, putting on makeup when he stepped into the room with an ominous look on his face and a towel wrapped around his hand.  That is never a good sign.  He said he'd cut his fingers up and maybe broken the air conditioner, too.  I calmly finished putting on my makeup because freaking out wouldn't have helped much.  Besides, if we were going to have to get it stitched, I didn't want to look like white trash.  I contemplated if our guests were going to be willing to watch kids for us if we had to visit the Emergency Room.

Luckily, it was just a flesh wound.  One that made me cringe to look at.  In fact, my toes are curling now writing about it.  As a woman who married a man who does lots of manly dangerous sharp and hurty things, I should be used to it.  Three months before we were married, he lopped the corners off two of his fingers in a power miter box building houses with his dad.  He once mangled the pad of his thumb enough that I'm not sure there's a fingerprint left on it.  What I'm trying to say is that Toby is used to getting hurt, and seeing blood.  

All was well with some super glue holding the wound shut.  No ER visit today. We managed to take a deep breath and enjoy supper and a visit. Now it's bedtime, and the AC in the dining room window is happily whirring away.  Somewhere, our electric company is smiling.

Three, sir!

This little guy turned three.  Let's see what Loch is up to these days, shall we?

You are my only snuggler.  All the other kids were too interested in thrashing around and running off to really cuddle.  You are a master at sitting down in my lap with a contented-puppy wiggle.  Then you'll gaze up soulfully at my with your big blue eyes and flutter your amazing eyelashes.  You are a major flirt.  How can I say no to that?

You love Thomas, but you also love anything that moves on wheels, and all types of tools.  Your favorite thing in the whole wide world is to help Dad fix something.  For your birthday, we got you a big red toolbox with a tiny wrench, screwdrivers, tape measure, hammer and wee drill.  All day, you would answer questions  by making sounds with the drill.  It speaks for you now.



I had the idea of letting you pick out a can of spray paint at the hardware store to personalize all your tools and make them your own.  You picked white, of all colors.  Today, Aunt Laural asked what color cake you'd like...white.  Frosting color....white.  Grandma happened to have bought vanilla ice cream, so that was white, too.  I guess you're having a "white album" kind of birthday.

You are very particular about how you think the world should be.  You CAN NOT handle when things don't turn out as you expected.  There are lots of meltdowns some days.  However, when things work out as you hoped, you can be transcendently happy and busy for a long time.  I look forward to appreciating your tenacity later. 



You are getting much more understandable at speaking.  We've been working a lot at getting you to open your mouth, instead of just whining with it closed.  I've joked that if we were like the hippies and let a kid name himself at three, your name would be "UUUUUuuuuhhhhhhhhmmmmmmm.

You like to have clothes on, also unusual in our family.  For a long time, you got very upset if we didn't have shoes and socks on you.  You love to pick out the clothing you're going to wear, and when I get you dressed (and you like how it looks and feels), you always run off to show Dad or the older kids how nice you look.  You don't like shorts, for some reason.  Every time I try to put them on you, you whimper and tug at the hems, endeavoring to put them in the rightful place at ankle level.  Sweatpants are wrong, too, because they might hitch up over your calves and stay there...the horror!



You have a funny way of looking at things.  Example:  One day for breakfast, Toby was making you some toast, and you kept asking for something to go with it, and he couldn't tell what you were saying. He finally realized you were requesting "toast-top."  (Butter).  Guess what we call butter at our house, now.  You like to talk about how the ticks want to suck the juice out of you.

Little Loch, you have a lot of nicknames.  We call you the little boy, Lockin, Lockerbee,  and Loch Ness Monster (my personal favorite).  You are a perplexing mix of laser-beam focus, hair-trigger emotions, and endless sweetness.  We are lucky to have you and can't wait to meet whoever you will be every day.

Goals: I have them.

In spite of haunting the internet daily, I have left behind few traces on this blog.  Life has been very real around here lately.  Do I make the laundry list of what we've been up to? Unfortunately, it's pretty mundane after considering the oddity of making corsets for a living.  Since school is out, Liv asks almost every morning what we're doing that day, and the answer is almost always the same:  working.

I've decided I'd like to have something to remember the time by, instead of just knowing that we made it through in a blur of business...busy-ness, I mean.  We are up to a few other things at this time.  Remember previously when I said we were trying hard to eat better food?  I'd say we have been mildly successful.  We planted three or four times the garden this year than ever before. We have had lettuce, mesclun, spinach, radishes, peas, asparagus, and beans already.  All of those are either gone or need to be pulled out since they're not handling the heat well (aside from the asparagus, we're not THAT clueless).  We are waiting on the tomatoes to really start ripening, and have a few cucumbers, squash and peppers that are growing nicely but not producing yet.  There are onions that we pull up as needed, too.

I like having a garden.  I feel it represents visually and culinarily the work we've done to have it.  I like going out in the mornings and seeing what's up, what's edible, and what requires water.  In fact, it would be perfectly idyllic to check on the plants each morning if there weren't so many invisible ninja thistles scattered throughout the yard, or if I'd wear shoes.  Blasted thistles.

We've had baby chicks for a week today as well.  We bought fifteen meat birds and ten egg-laying types.  So far, so good.  Toby built a nice safe little coop for them to be in while they're little, with an attached yard for when they get a bit bigger.  Ultimately, we plan to make portable shelters for them, so that they can be moved each day and eat tons of bugs and grass.

The kids love catching grasshoppers and feeding them to the chicks.  Ivy will spend hours doing it, or just watching them through the wire-mesh ventilation holes in the sides of the coop.  The chicks are trained, Pavlov-style, to expect food when they see her.  I'd been a bit worried about the kids getting all attached to these fluffy little birds and not wanting to eat them, but considering how bloodthirsty they all are feeding them bugs, I don't think that will be a problem when the time comes.

I have been reading tons of books by Joel Salatin, who raises pastured poultry, pork and beef.  He is a vocal advocate of local food from sustainable farming practices.  Add to the mix a distrust and disgust for the whole industrial farming/huge corporation/government subsidies/junk food quadfecta (like a trifecta, right?), and you have us baby-stepping our way out of the system.  Oh yeah, it also appeals to my control-freak streak.

Next, I plan  to work on getting more hot weather things planted in the garden and possibly getting some other livestock.  I'd love to rehab our fields and we need something grazing and pooping out there  to do it.  I think sheep would be interesting, a bit cheaper than cows, and safer around the kids, but that's still in the brainstorming phase.  Now lets see if I can keep up with all of it while recording it here online.  Maybe with pictures, even.