i am a butterfly…

Archive for the ‘Attics of My Life’ Category

As I write this, I have my GPS unit connected to my laptop to update her maps.* The map update is necessary, because as we drove around in New Jersey this past weekend, we often found ourselves driving off the map due to various construction projects on the exit ramps of the Garden State Parkway. So it really is necessary, but I confess to a small pang of regret. The regret comes from the idea that this update may cure Gurty’s unique outlook on getting places.

There’s a saying from ancient Rome, about how all roads lead to Rome. In Gurty’s little electronic mind, all roads lead to, and from, downtown Newark.

She once took us from Colonia, NJ to Fredon, NJ by way of downtown Newark.*** Go on and look at Google Maps. You can see that this is not exactly the most direct route. Later that same night, she also took us home to Da Bronx by way of downtown Newark. On another occasion, we were looking for a gas station before we returned a rental car to the Avis counter at Newark airport. This time, at least I can say we were headed toward the city of Newark, but Gurty eschewed all rest area service stations, intent on taking us to downtown Newark for gas. She would brook no deviation from this plan, so eventually we gave in and let her have her way.

We had a near miss on Saturday, when we took a right side fork in the road toward the Turnpike while she gleefully told us to turn left. Left, toward the sign that read: Downtown Newark.

It’s not just Newark, though. She seems to be exceptionally fond of the scenic route. The route less taken. The route that wends through the middle of nowhere or goes 30 miles out of the way.

We had an example of this on Saturday, when we left a friend’s house in NJ and decided to take the new car for a drive. We headed up the Parkway into New York, trying to avoid the horrendous northbound traffic we’d seen on 95 earlier in the day. Our plan was to drive north for a while until we hit the point of no return for Gurty, the point where she would no longer tell us to turn around and take the George Washington Bridge. Around Harriman, we judged it far enough and turned her on. The first thing she did was tell us to make a U-turn and head back to the GWB.

Ignoring that advice, we kept driving until we knew that heading east would take us to the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge. A nice big bridge that would take us back to our side of the Hudson River, where surely Gurty would then find us a nice route home on the eastern side.  But because Gurty is insane and probably a small bit delightedly evil, the first thing she did when we got over the bridge was tell us to take the first exit and turn around. For the first 10 or 15 miles on the eastern side of the river, she kept trying to convince us to turn around, go back over the river, go south, and take the GWB.

Eventually, we managed to convince her that we wanted to keep going east, so she changed tactics. Fine, she said. Go this way, she said. Go on, keep going east and east and east, until you hit 684. “684?” I said to Scott. “Wouldn’t the Taconic be better?”

At this point, I checked Gurty’s settings, because one time I had her set to pedestrian mode, and what a load of laughs we had following her directions then. But no, she was set to automobile mode, and also set to take the fastest route and to not avoid highways.

We decided to take the Taconic. At first, she was thrilled. She thought we were turning around and finally taking her advice to go back over to the western side of the river. When she realized we were actually starting to head south, she became upset. “Turn left!” she shrilled. “Turn left! Turn left! Turn left!” We kept turning right. She sulkily informed us that she was recalculating and stayed silent for a while.

Scott and I were now on solid ground as far as knowing where we were and we could have turned Gurty off at that point, but I always think she’s going to choose a better route than one we already know. I give her way too much credit. So we left her on to see what she would say, and she suddenly had an idea. “Take the next exit,” she slyly suggested. I zoomed out and saw that she wanted us to exit so we could take her original plan and go to 684. We ignored her. For 10 more miles, she kept suggesting that we should take the next exit, head to 684, and arrive home at 10:01.

We ignored all her pleas, whining, and cajoling.

Finally, when she had no further choice, she grudgingly allowed that we should stay on the Taconic  and take that route. As soon as she recalculated for this route, the route we wanted to take all along, she gave us a new estimated arrival time: 9:50.

11 minutes earlier than her plan.

That was the final bit of evidence it took to convince me: she’s crazy. Scott and I decided that we kind of like that, though. It’s sort of charming, how insane she is.

“It’s not the best thing, though,” I said to Scott. “You realize this means we can’t trust her? It’s fine when we know where we’re going, but we have to be vigilant when we don’t.”

“Yeah,” he replied. “But she’s always ready for an adventure! That’s good!”

“True. And at least we know we’re not those people who will drive into a lake because the GPS told them to. We can never trust her enough to mindlessly follow her directions. So… bonus.”

Whether or not she’ll retain her insanity after this map update remains to be seen, but I hope Gurty’s still keen on adventures. I could do without all the trips to downtown Newark, though.

*Yes, she’s a she, not an it. She has a name, too. Her name is Gurty.**

** Gurty comes from GPS, because it makes me think of GURPS. Gurpy didn’t seem like a good name.

*** On that same trip, she also took us through downtown Morristown.

My mother and I were talking on Saturday and the subject of my childhood exploits came up. While quiet and bookish most of the time, I also had a wild streak that would make any parent’s heart stop beating. There was the time when I was 7 that I tried to ride my bike on the New Jersey turnpike, of course, but there were also less spectacular, nearly every day occurrences that, had my mother known about them, would have had me locked in my room forever.

There were the times Ginny and I went out onto the cliffs behind our building, for example. She was in 3rd grade and I was in 2nd, and we just thought it was a fun place to climb around and jump and play and look at the river. Those “cliffs behind out building” are also known as The Palisades and they look a lot like this.

Then there were the times I used to walk up and down the 3 flights of stairs outside my grandmother’s house in roller skates.  That was how we got on the subject of my adventures, because I mentioned my broken arm and it was outside my grandmother’s house, on roller skates, that I broke my arm. I wasn’t going up and down the stairs at the time. Instead I was flying down the steep driveway and making a sharp right turn onto the sidewalk. This was a maneuver I pulled many times before, but on that day I was mad at my cousin, Amy, and turned around to yell at her when I hit the sidewalk. I forgot about the bump in the pavement and tripped instead of stepping over it as I usually did. Snap, the two bones in my right forearm broke when I hit the ground.

Undaunted by the cast from my hand up to my shoulder, I was a holy terror to the nurses in the hospital. I learned pretty quickly that they didn’t come right away when I rang the bell, so I took matters into my own hands one night and tried climbing out of the hospital bed. This involved getting over the railing, which I didn’t manage so well. I ended up falling, smacking my head and the casted elbow of the broken arm in the process. When a nurse found me laying on the floor half an hour later, I was still dazed, trying to get up the energy to try the process in reverse and climb back into the bed.

The next day, my mother, all unknowing about the incident with me falling over the side of the bed, asked what she could bring her sweet baby to make me feel better. My reply? A skateboard.

Even after breaking my arm, I didn’t really believe anything bad couldn’t happen to me. Sure, the broken arm hurt, but it was going to heal, and I was still alive, right? So no big harm done. (This attitude fueled a lot of my casual attitude about recreational drug use, and I count myself fortunate that I realized it was a harmful attitude about certain drugs at a point before they turned into a problem.)

Somewhere along the line, and I can’t pinpoint when, I lost my fearlessness. (My mother calls it lack of common sense, but I think fearlessness sounds better.) I started being afraid of everything, and not just fear for myself, but also for everyone around me.  And the more I think about it, the more I think that my fear of physical danger grew out of my built-up fear of emotional danger.

Even though I’ve always been shy, I spent a lot of my life putting myself out there emotionally. My physical adventurousness was nothing compared to my emotional adventurousness, but unlike the physical risks I took, my emotional risks usually didn’t work out very well. I was too open, and I got my heart stomped on. A lot. As a result, I stopped taking risks. I wrapped myself up around my heart and protected myself, and some part of me took a look at that and said, “Hey! If you can get your spirit knocked around so many times, it’s only a matter of time before you do something dumb and end up killing yourself.” I stopped taking risks, with my heart and with my person.

That was a long time ago, and I never broke the habit of playing it safe. I’m still very cautious about opening up to anyone, and I very rarely do. Other than Scott, I don’t think anyone really knows me on a deeper than superficial level, and I keep it that way, because if I don’t let you in, you can’t hurt me. But I see signs that I might be coming out of that shell a little. There are a few people now I’ve let in enough to see me warts and all, and I think they still like me.

When we were in Mexico, I swam in 98 feet of water even though my best swimming event is floating. As I clung to the bottom of the ladder leading into the water, I looked up at Scott standing at the top.

“I’m afraid,” I said to him.

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” he replied.

I let go of the ladder.

Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll temper any fearlessness I reclaim with common sense.

As in new ones, I has them. It’s been years and years since I got a new pair of glasses. Fortunately, my prescription hadn’t changed much so the old ones were fine, but it was time for something new. I loved these instantly. The little blue flowers with the rhinestone centers did me in as soon as I saw them.

Let me begin by saying this: I do not collect decorative spoons.

For the 2008 ABC-Along, I wrote about the cow cookie jar we bought on our honeymoon in Aruba. I briefly mentioned that the cow was purchased on the last day of our trip, when we suddenly realized that we hadn’t bought any souvenirs the whole time we were there. It wasn’t until I was cleaning out a drawer in the kitchen last week that I remembered that we also bought this, the decorative spoon.

Have I mentioned that I don’t collect decorative spoons? I just grabbed this thing in an act of desperation so that I would have some record of our honeymoon. Some proof that we actually went to Aruba, since we also weren’t really photo-snappers in those days and have very few photos from that trip. I’m sure that I thought it was some sort of ironic purchase somehow, but looking back, it was just stupid. Now I have this decorative spoon cluttering up the kitchen and I don’t know what to do with it. Maybe I should display it with my ironic collection of shot glasses.

I’m a little late to this party*, but I still wanted to play, so I am.  This week is Knitting and Crochet Blog Week. Each day for this week** bloggers are invited to write about a specific topic pertaining to knitting/crocheting. This is Monday’s topic, but let’s just call it Day 1.

How and when did you begin knitting/crocheting? was it a skill passed down through generations of your family, or something you learned from Knitting For Dummies? What or who made you pick up the needles/hook for the first time? Was it the celebrity knitting ‘trend’ or your great aunt Hilda? TAGGING CODE: knitcroblo1

I remember my maternal grandmother (Mom-mom) and paternal great-grandmother (Grandma S) as being prolific crocheters, though thinking back I think Mom-Mom may have been a knitter. There’s one particular afghan she made that I’m sure had bobbles all over it, and I don’t think you can do bobbles with crochet.*** Grandma S did try to teach me to crochet as a small child, but I was never that into it. I picked up some basics like chaining and single crochets, but I was far more interested in my grandmother’s sewing machine**** and didn’t really like to crochet.

These days, I’m much more interested in learning to crochet that I was when I was five, but because of that early indifference, what little I know about crochet is entirely self-taught. My true passion, though, is knitting. Knitting and I had a rocky start that began in college. There was a small yarn store in my tiny little college town, and I wandered in there one day, drawn by all the colors. For some reason, I decided I would only knit with cotton, so I loaded myself up with brightly colored skeins of Sugar n’ Cream cotton and a pair of needles and set out to learn. This was well before the Internet, so I must have also bought a book or something, but I don’t remember. It’s possible that I just decided to learn from the ball band.

As you might imagine, the combination of cotton yarn and lack of resources to really learn what to do was enough to make that first venture short-lived. Over the years I tried several times to pick it up again, but it never lasted. I still had that stubborn insistence that I was going to knit with cotton and only cotton, and that made learning to knit really hard. Between the dryness, the slipperiness, and how hard it was on my hands, I never got far. I honestly don’t know what the hell I was thinking or why I thought it had to be cotton or nothing.

About four-and-a-half years ago, though, something changed.  I decided, once again, to try learning to knit. Once again, I stubbornly picked up Sugar n’ Cram cotton with which to do it. This time, though, I had the Web and several different sites to teach me how to knit. It still wasn’t easy, but something just… clicked. I suddenly got it, and suddenly I was loving knitting. Then I discovered alpaca and it was all over for me. Once I discovered that soft, wonderful fiber and the pleasure that could be found in knitting with something like that****, I was done for. Knitting suddenly became a passion.

And it still is a passion, several years later. I am so happy that this time, it took. The enjoyment I get out of knitting can’t be measured, but it brings so much delight. Now, I can’t imagine not knitting.

* So what else is new, right? Late is my middle name!

** Or for this week plus some, for those of us who are always late to things.

*** I could be wrong; I know very little about crochet.

*** Though, I still couldn’t sew to save my life, so that didn’t work out very well.

**** Not to mention the pleasure that can be had by keeping a ball of it on my desk to pet once in a while.

Today marks the 8th anniversary of my very first blog post. Looking back at my old posts from the first few years of blogging, I’m struck by two things:

1. Holy crap I had a lot to say.
2. Holy crap I was so passionate about all those things I had to say.

I’m going to go with “passionate” in that second point, rather than “opinionated,” “overbearing,” or “cocky.” Let’s stick with “passionate.”

It hardly needs pointing out that I don’t post here nearly as much as I used to do. Part of that is that I’ve mellowed, and I’m not nearly as… ahem… passionate about a lot of things as I used to be. Part of it is that I got tired of being so, you know, passionate. Part of it is that Twitter has taken the place of the multiple short little blog posts I used to make. And part of it is that my audience has changed. Where pretty much everyone who read my blog eight years ago was either a blogger herself, an otherwise online-only acquaintance, or my mother, now the people who read this site are mostly people I know in meatspace.

That, Dear Reader, is daunting.

I don’t feel like I can be nearly as free about what I post now, which sometimes makes me sad, and oftentimes makes for a lack of posting. Some things have been verbotten since the very beginning. Things like the inner workings of my relationship with Scott, for example. That’s always been and always will be off limits for such a public venue, but now I’m also less likely to talk about all those girl troubles the way I used to do. I’m also more likely to keep my more passionate political opinions to myself, for fear of offending friends I know are equally passionate about opposing opinions.

As a result, I have a lot less to talk about here, because let’s face it, without cervical mucus and abortion, what do I really have?

But I keep this place around anyway, even if all I really use it for these days is talking about knitting now and then and posting cat photos. Every once in a while, I do have something of more substance that I want to talk about, and I plan to continue doing that. Who knows? Whole new chapters may be opening up soon. In the meantime, we’ll just keep on chugging along on cat photos.

First off, Scott’s mother is not in a medically induced coma, as it turns out. The information we’ve been getting from family members on the scene has been altered as people put their own take on it and as a certain family member spins it to cause the most feelings of guilt in those who aren’t there. Scott’s brother arrives in Pittsburgh today, so I expect to start getting more accurate information. Or at least less altered information.

We going to drive out on Thursday or Friday now, depending on what his brother says when we speak to him later today.

Second, the shared SSL thing at my Web host has been resolved. I woke up to find an email apologizing for the way it was handled and the news that they renewed the shared SSL certificate for another year. So now I still have to set up a few clients with their own SSL certs, but we have time to do it correctly instead of making it a mad scramble because the sites are down without it.

Third, one of the sites that was going down, which was why all those sites got moved to another server, went down again today. But the good news is that the other sites did not go down with it, and also it seemed to resolve on its own without having to reset IIS. Hopefully that was just an isolated incident, but I’m keeping a close eye on things.

All in all, today is a much better day. A little bad, but mostly it doesn’t suck as thoroughly as yesterday. There’s hope for everything.

Several of my clients’ Web sites were supposed to be moved to a new server Saturday night. The server they were on kept crashing, and my host’s tech support thought it might be because of a particular very high-volume site they shared my sites shared the server with. So the idea was to move the sites to a new server and see what happened. Most of the sites in question had dynamic IPs and moving them would result in just a few minutes of downtime, but one has a static IP and moving that one was going to result in several hours of downtime. That was why Saturday late night was selected for the move.

Sunday morning, I got up and everything was running along swimmingly. All the sites were up and running and there were no problems at all that needed fixing. I know enough about technology to be suspicious of such a miracle, but I shoved that deep down and tried to pretend it was all good.

As it turns out, the reason the sites were all running along swimmingly was that the switch didn’t happen Saturday night. It happened last night. And when I got up this morning, one site was not running along swimmingly at all. It had a zillion things wrong that needed fixing. However, I took it all in stride and with the support of a simply outstanding tech support guy, we got everything fixed and working and it was good. Seriously, I can’t say enough good things about Nate, who dealt with all of this mishegas and was patient and thorough and a pleasure to work with.

Then, I got email from a client whose site had nothing to do with this mess saying her customers were getting weird security errors on her site when trying to checkout. It turned out that the shared SSL certificate her site used had expired, so I notified my hosting company and asked them to renew it. The reply I got back – not from the aforementioned Nate, I should say – said, in not quite so many words:

“Oh, yeah. We broke your sites 4 days ago without warning, but we’ll be glad to let you pay us for the privilege of getting them working again.”

They decided to discontinue shared SSL, you see, and so they let the shared SSL certificate expire. This would have all been well and good. I’ve no problem with talking this particular client into her own SSL certificate. She’s been in business for a long time and it’s a good step for her. The problem is, they did this with no warning whatsoever. Instead of telling me with 6 or 3 or even 1 month notice, they told me 4 days after the fact when I found out the site was broken.

And now it’s going to stay broken until we can get a the site owner her own SSL certificate, which can take a few days with all the paperwork involved. And not only will her checkout process be broken in that time, but guess who’s going to eat the cost of the first year for the certificate? Yeah. Me. Because I give my clients better customer service than my host is currently giving me.

As I’m dealing with this mess, stressing out that this is going to take a few days of dealing with to get straightened out and knowing that I’m not going to be in my office for the next two days as we spend 12 hours on the road to and from Pittsburgh to see my sick mother-in-law, Scott calls to tell me that his mother has been re-intubated and put into a medically-induced coma, because she couldn’t breathe on her own anymore. The coma is because she kept fighting the tube – and really, who can blame her? – so they had to knock her out so she wouldn’t pull it out. The result of this is that when we got there tomorrow, she wouldn’t even know we were there.

The doctors say they can leave her intubated for 4 more days. Her living will says she doesn’t want to go on like that, so on Friday they take out the tube and see if she can breathe on her own.  This left Scott, and me, in a wash of confusion, trying to figure out what the hell we should do. Do we still go to Pittsburgh tomorrow and have her not know we’re even there, then have her wake up Friday after we’re gone and say, “Where’s Scott?” Or worse, have hew not wake up on Friday and have Scott not be there?

In the end, we decided to postpone the trip until Friday morning. This way, whatever happens, Scott will be there when they pull out the tube. He sounded a lot more peaceful after that decision was made, so I know it’s the right one.

Today has been the most godsawful day from the moment I opened my eyes, going from bad to much worse. Grown up stuff really sucks.

I think I just discovered why the Universe has seen fit to keep me from giving birth to a child. It’s streams of consciousness like this:

“Dear Prudence, won’t you come out to play… Prudence, that’s a nice name. Prudence Josephine? Prudence Jo? We could call her  PruJo. Haha. CuJo. It’s perfect.”

The Universe, in its infinite wisdom, must have decided that someone like me cannot be trusted with the task of naming a child.

Me: You’re disagreeing just for the sake of disagreeing!

Him: No! I’ll disagr- Wait. Crap.