Ferry Tale

I was born and raised in a family with a modestly sized farm we all pitched in on.  Later I moved to a moderately sized city where I met my partner, Joseph.  And still later, we moved to a very modestly sized island in Puget Sound.  So I went from the rural life to the city life and now I live in limbo.  My island is nestled in between two ferry rides (three if you count the two directions from the north end, but we never use that way).  One takes you back to the modestly sized city we moved from and the other takes you to the city where I work.  And in between is our little rural island. 

At the time, moving away from the city life was a breeze; a breath of fresh air.  I found myself suddenly able to see the stars after living amongst apartment buildings under a dome of phosphorescent light.  I had forgotten the stars, and how much the meant to me.  My dad and I used to just look at them.  Back in Idaho, where I am from, the January nights become frozen spectacles of light.  The stars seem so bright and so vivid, you can almost reach out and touch them.  I always imagined they were so cold that they would burn your fingers, but that may have been the frost bite nipping while Dad and I were out under that vast dome of sky. 

The stars were one of the many signs that Joseph and I had made the right move, renting a farm house, and moving onto a five acre plot of land with a crumbling old farm house and a couple of out buildings on it.  Living here has been a blessing in many ways.  But living here was made easier by the fact that I found a job for myself on the island and no longer had to ride the ferry.  Now that it has become a part of my daily commute again, I find myself desperately wishing for the time I spend on the commute back. 

Take for instance, last night: a good friend of mine from work was having a birthday party and Joseph and I had to leave just when the party was warming up into a karaoke extravaganza.  But that is ferry life.  Where ever you need to go, you have to add an hour and a half (two if you’re smart and don’t want to miss the ferry) to each end of your trip.  The ferry schedule becomes a sort of oracle that tells you how long you have to spend in each place you go.  If you run off on a wonderful vacation, get away for a week or two, and come back home, I guarantee you that a ferry is waiting for you and it’s going to be a bear of a ferry to get onto. 

When we first took a trip out to look at our island, Joseph (who might have some obsessive tendencies, and who loves me dearly) started feeling that we might sink on our little trip.  He insisted that I wear a life preserver.  I refused.  I was not going to walk around a boat full of strangers wearing a life preserver.  But I could see that this was distressing to my man and I care about his feelings so I came up with a compromise.  I would put the life preserver in a back pack and I would wear the back pack at all times.  He agreed to this.  And looking back at it, both of us laugh about it.  The ferry is full of life preservers.  Most bench seats have them stored underneath them.  There are whole bins full of them on every deck.  But that’s what phobias do.  They are by definition irrational little fears.  (Don’t get me started on my phobias.  Sasquatch can wait for another blog.) 

We pay to live where we live three times.  We pay the taxes that support the ferries.  (Thank you, fellow tax payers.)  We pay the ferry tolls.  (Which are not reduced in any way shape or form for residents.  And in tourist seasons we pay inflated rates like everyone else.) And we pay with our time.  So often (especially around the holidays and the tourist seasons) the ferry workers become grumpy.  I understand.  Their job is a lot of customer service coupled with dealing with drivers commuting 100% of the time.  Could you imagine if your 9-5 job was nothing but putting up with idiots on your commute?  And because they are state employees, what the ferry workers say and do may as well come directly from the mouths of gods who control your destiny.  You will and you must park where they say, drive where they say, get on when they say, leave when they say.  But what ferry workers don’t seem to understand is that they are holding our homes ransom.  We must put up with them, we can’t get home otherwise.  It’s all give and no take.  I wonder how many of them (once they get off of the ferry) actually have to take a ferry after they punch out to get home.  I’m sure if they did, they might be a little more patient with elderly ladies who can’t seem to make a sharp turn to fit into their allotted spot.  They might smile more.  They might make more friends among us. 

But for now, the ferry system is nibbling the ends of my life away.  Joseph and I have discussed it several times over, and when our lease is up, we will be moving off of the island.  I’m not sure how I can adjust to life away from our little dream of a farm house.  I’m not sure if I will be able to see the stars when I get to where we are going.  But they say variety is the spice of life, and not knowing where I am going is part of our adventure! 

Sharks and Mermaids

Long before I met my Joseph, I was a wild, foot-loose guy in Idaho.  I had my best friend, who also happened to be my cousin, Nicole.  We had wonderful adventures when I rented my first place all by myself in Coeur d’Alene.  We were both in community college going for artsy things and life just seemed infinitely beautiful and wonderful.  Because this was the 1990’s, one of the songs that came on the radio that we adopted as one of our anthems was Billie Myer’s “Kiss the Rain.”  This song lead us to an even better song:  The Shark and the Mermaid song. 

Mermaids were always my thing, as evidenced by the mermaid tattoo I have on my right arm. 

Only a couple of years later (even though it felt like a life time later) I found myself married in Seattle with a dog (soon to be two of the mongrels).  I told my hubby about the song, and even tried to sing it to him in spite of my lack of a Siren’s voice.  He did his own research and read the lyrics, and it was Joseph who decided that this was our song.

The song details the affair of a beautiful mermaid who falls in love with a gruff shark and in spite of the world thinking that they were an unlikely match, they “grew together, they were strong.”  And as mermaids were always one of my favorite things, I fell for the sappiness of this song as our song hook, line, and sinker. 

In 2009, for our upcoming ninth anniversary, Joseph hired a local jeweler to create “upgraded” rings for us.  On the inside of mine the inscription reads, “Shark loves his Mermaid.”  On the inside of Joseph’s the inscription reads, “Mermaid loves his Shark.”  And the mermaid/shark theme has sort of permeated our life together. 

Now, my love of mermaids is well known among my friends, and this year my friends Nate and Jackie gave me a mermaid cookie cutter.  This sent me into my pantry to assess my cookie cutter situation.  I threw out a lot of those old metal cookie cutters, as they have a nasty habit of rusting when they sit around my damp house.  So that left me down to only my plastic cookie cutters and my new mermaid cutter. 

Now, I had a great many of these plastic cookie cutters because I had happened one day upon a set of 50 animal cookie cutters so my pantry is full of dinosaurs, dogs, cats, rabbits, lions, sheep, and on and on.  So this year when I went to make my Christmas cookies I found that I was completely out of Christmas shapes.  So that is when I got creative. 



We had a Shark and Mermaid themed Christmas!!! 

I added some ocean friends for them, too.  I imagine there was a wise-cracking octopus and a prissy angel fish.

And maybe there was a seahorse with a heart of gold. 

Whatever they looked like, the cookies went down great with a cup of coffee! 

Granny Squares Everywhere

Not to be out-done by Joseph and his new found crocheting skills, I found a resource in my friend Michelle and began making Granny Squares in mass!

My first were a little loose, but they soon tightened up nicely. 

Frankly, I Do Give A Damn ... About my name.

While looking over the latest trends in baby names (Vampires, Werewolves, and the gals who love them seem to be the emerging themes) I stumbled across this little tidbit from Parentingweekly.com:

"Like Hank, [the name] Frank has a dated feel to it. He is either an honest, upstanding hero of a musty old novel, or a guy in a tank top cooking hot dogs at the backyard barbecue."

            Somehow this statement seemed racist, but I have to accept that people named Frank do not make up a race, so I had to drop that thread.  I have never barbecued a hot dog.  (They made me sick as a kid, so I have never liked them.  Sorry, America.)  And the only time I ever wore a tank top was back in the ‘90’s when the whole bowling shirt and cargo pant craze was happening.  It occurred to me that this statement was made by somebody who didn’t know a Frank so had only the Hardy Boys and The Sopranos to supplement his understanding of people named Frank.  So, I may help the Frank cause by giving a little information on a few famous Franks. 

            Now, there are a great many athletes named Frank, but the stereotype surrounding the sports world might lead us right back to Barbeque Frank, so I will omit these Franks, though I am proud that some of us don’t throw like sissies. 

           We had a couple of Franks win the Nobel Peace Prize.  In 1929, Frank Billings Kellogg won it for peace for his work on a treaty that proposed countries take up "the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy."  In 1960, Frank MacFarlane Burnet won it for his work in Medicine.  And in 2004, Frank Wilczek won it for his work as a physicist in the field of Asymptotic Freedom. (I don’t even know what this means, but it sounded super impressive, so I included him.) 

We had a couple of Franks for President: Franklin Pierce and Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Pierce was famous for being one of the worst presidents in history.  (Of course he predated other administrations …) But it was okay, because the other Franklin, Mr. FDR gave this country a New Deal. 

I’ve always been drawn to the arts and literature as a whole, and it thrills me to say that some of the best Franks come to us from creative fields:



Frank Sinatra was crooning to mothers, grandmothers, and probably great grandmothers in ways that had them all sighing for “Old Blue Eyes.”  And if it weren’t for Frank Zappa’s music, we might all have eaten the yellow snow. 

Frank Lloyd Write was an architect who used his amazing vision to shape the world around us. 

And this might not have even happened …

 … had L. Frank Baum never took us down his Yellow Brick Road with a Tin Woodman, Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow, a little black dog, and a brave little girl.  Of course,  L. Frank Baum wasn’t the only writer who took us to far off and exotic worlds.  Frank Herbert gave us “Dune” and has set the bar for the Science Fiction genre ever since. 

Frank Herbert's works even inspired George Lucas when he created his Star Wars Trilogy.  You didn’t think it was a coincidence that Luke was from a Desert Planet, did you?  And one of my favorite Star Wars Characters might never have made it to the Big Screen had it not been for another famous Frank: Frank Oz. 

And I owe one of the greatest loves of my life to Frank Oz as well:



So you see, the world has been and will forever be greatly enhanced by the Franks who populate it.  I struggle to do my part and keep up with all these guys.  But who knows, maybe someday some little unheard of blogger will record my name down with these other guys as the Frank who took a stand against blatant Name Discrimination. 

Owls, Owls Everywhere!

My Aunt Marsha used to wear over-large glasses that were popular in the late seventies and early eighties.  She had shoulder length brown hair, and a mouth that was sometimes drawn into a terse line.  In short, she looked a little like an owl.  And it made sense to everyone in my family that Aunt Marsha loved owls.  People gave her owl sculptures and owl mugs.  On her window sill she had owls made from shells and owls made from ceramics.  On her walls she had owls woven into hook rugs and owls made of wood.  Whenever we saw an owl we could afford (and there were lots of them coming out of the seventies) we would get it for Aunt Marsha. 

One day, my Aunt Marsha, who was moving into a new house and starting a new chapter in her life, made an announcement.  She looked at us all solemnly in her smaller, updated glasses and proclaimed, “I hate owls.” 

You could have heard a mouse scuttle across the forest floor in that room on that day.  Everything we had believed of this woman, Aunt Marsha, had been an illusion.  Her first owl, she said, had come from her first husband’s family as a sort of gift to her, which she had to display or offend the givers of the gift.  And when my family saw the owl in her house, it suddenly had become Aunt Marsha’s totem to us.  We perpetuated our own myth about Aunt Marsha the Patron Saint of Owls.  She had had to put up with our owl enthusiasm for so many years before she finally put the tokens of owl-esteem into boxes and got rid of them.  She started a new, bird-free life.  She liberated herself from our expectations and moved forward. 

So I have always harbored this fear that I would be painted with other people’s expectations of what I might like and I kept my affinity for owls a secret for many years of my life.  It seems as though the last five years or so saw a rise in owl popularity.  Everyone had something with an owl in it, on it, or around it.  This trend kept me even more tightly lipped about my love of Strigiformes. 

There is some debate about where and when the apparently sudden love of owls come from.  You can find owl merchandise in all the trendiest shops.  Many cutting-edge people are standing up in life or on the internet to say they ushered in this age of the owl.  But I know better.  Athena, the goddess of Ancient Athens brought in the owl craze and it has been going strong since before 500 BCE.  I loved owls, why was I hiding this love to avoid having people think differently of me for it?  My love for owls is a part of who I am.  

So this Christmas, I proclaimed my owl love loudly and proudly. 

And people listened. 

My super cool Secret Pal at work (Jody!) gave to me a small stuffed owl, an owl hat, and an owl Christmas tree ornament among other wonderful things.  Another couple of work friends gave me a furry owl with a rainbow pin attached to his plumes.  And my Joseph even got in on the act.  He gave to me a stuffed owl with jazzy pink and purple patterns and an apron with an owl print and dangly balls on the bottom so I can entertain in my own owl attire now. 

I feel my owl collection is off to a good start.  And I don’t think it will go south the way it did with my Aunt Marsha.  For one thing, I truly do love owls.  And for another thing, I have many more loves I am more than happy to share.  For instance, did you know, I also love peacocks and garden gnomes? 

I had a wonderful haul this year for Christmas.  Thank you, everybody. 

Martha Stewart or Charlie Brown? I'm somewhere in between

So …

Every year for Christmas I like to do something a little different.  One year I did a theme which was “Holiday at Hogwarts,” and featured things such as ornaments made from empty boxes of Bertie Botts’ Every Flavor Beans.  One year I did a “traditional theme” and used wrapping paper to wrap the wall behind my tree to make it pop.  One year I made ornaments from shells we found on the beach and covered them with glitter to make a very Island sort of tree the first year we spent on this island. 

Joseph is pretty easy going when it comes to my themes and ideas and inspirations.  At times this can be infuriating, especially when I want an opinion.  But mostly I find this good for my creativity when Mr. Logical isn’t criticizing my every move.  Joseph’s one request is that we never kill a tree to make our Christmas.  I grew up in the Rocky Mountains of northern Idaho where we cut down our own tree every year.  I loved the smell of white fir and cold coming into the house.  But Joseph (who drives a beast of a pickup truck) thinks that cutting trees isn’t very environmentally-minded.  He bought me a Martha Stewart pre-lit tree that stands four-and-a-half feet tall.  It has white lights and has graced my house many a year regardless of the theme and has always looked great.  This year, however, I wanted something more natural and less symmetrical. 

I had an idea in my head, and when I found this tree on my dog walk one day, I couldn’t resist:

I knew it had potential.  I knew I could make this tree shine.  In my head I saw this tree in all its glory, thanks to my best friend Martha Stewart:

Awesome, right? 

So I set to work.  And soon I discovered a little known secret to the success of evergreens when it comes to the domination of Christmas décor: evergreens are conical and taper towards the top which is infinitely easier to wrap lights around than a tree that gets wider towards the top.  I had to string the lights twice, and I almost poked out an eye five or six times.  I used half a cinder block to prop the tree up and stuffed it with news paper to keep the tree in place, but every time I tried to adjust lights, it slid around a little.  I finally had to enlist Joseph and have him prop it up with a little hemp twine at the bottom. 

And here’s the other little secret about the success of evergreens when it comes to the domination of Christmas décor: they don’t look like skeletons!  My tree looked like I painted Kate Moss brown and tied her up in a corner.  I found myself thinking that a good cheese burger would do my tree some good, but I hung the ornaments from it just the same.  I didn’t have the money this year to buy all new tree jewelry, so I had to make do with the ornaments I had.  I strung my ornaments up with a little purple ribbon to give the ornaments the range to fall into some of the open spaces the branches made, but it still looked bare and sad. 

Okay, I thought, what this tree needs is a little snow. 

I try not to play up snow in my Christmas decorating.  I grew up in snow up to my armpits and there is nothing sadder to me than a snowman lawn ornament in a climate that shuts its cities down when it even thinks about snowing.  If you don’t have snow, don’t promote it.  But snow was the only thing I could think of to give this tree a little weight and fullness. 

If I had my way (and a lot more money) I would have bought a few white feather boas, cut them up, and used their fluffy fabulousness to fill in my scrawny tree.  (I have always thought that Christmas trees were a lot like drag queens anyway.)  So, because I didn’t have any of my own feather boas … that were white … I had to improvise and I found a bag of poly-fill to use for snow.  I pulled out puffs of polyester and stuck it at the end of branches.  The overall look was very sad and I am almost too ashamed to show you this:

What the crap is this?  When Joseph saw it he said it looked like I was trying to make a cotton bush.  That kind of made it worse and please remind me to tell you all about how Joseph almost got shot picking cotton in Louisiana when we went there to visit his family.  (No it wasn’t 1860, it was 2003.)  Needless to say, I furiously ripped every single one of these puffs off of my tree and sat down to rethink my life. 

Deep breath.

So the next thing I tried was an old reliable Christmas treatment: paper snowflakes.  Paper snowflakes got me through many a tough Christmas in apartments that were none too jolly.  What I got was a tree that had these papery, snowflake versions of leaves on it.  Fine. 

Yes, fine enough.  It was time to quit while I was ahead. 

I liked how the white paper snowflakes caught the colors of the Christmas lights.

The tree is continuing to grow on me.  It isn’t perfect, but it’s just fine for me.  But I will probably resort to the Martha Stewart pre-lit 4.5 footer next year.  Much less hassle, and much prettier effect. 

Joseph's New Found Skill

As promised I will share with you what Joseph's new crafting skill is.  He bought a book and taught himself to crochet from it, and has been shredding fabric and making rugs ever since.
Here are a few he made for his coworkers for Christmas:

This one was a sort of camp cottage rug.  It had burgundy and navy together with a few greens.  The green plaid really pops in the combination.

I told Joseph he should give these titles and consider them "art pieces."  He named this one "Ripple," as it evokes a forest pond. 

"Ripple" boasted a shiny thread that Joseph crocheted along with some of the jade green material to catch the light and shimmer. 

This one is for his boss, who is one of those Purple People.  I love purple, too, but I love all the other colors too much to become a Purple Person myself. 

This rug is made from all navy material interspersed with blue-printed white fabric.  It reminds me of those wonderful Currier and Ives dishes my Gram has, which I ate off of almost every day of my childhood. 

This one was my absolute favorite.  Joseph made it for a coworker who loves the color orange, and who couldn't love it when it makes such a fabulous hearth side rug?  It reminds me of a sun wheel, or a large, circular bale of hay.  The middle and edge is done in a very dark maroon that really pops with the orange.  Wish I was a better photographer. 

All of the earlier rugs were round rugs like this favorite orange one here, but Joseph found a way to make oblong rugs as well and now uses the oblong shape almost exclusively:

Whichever rug is your favorite, I can tell you from experience that they make your home feel a little cozier than a run-of-the-mill store bought rug.  I have two in my former dining room (current Christmas Tree Room), and I love them.