March 9 2015

The Most Negative Person I Know

I know a person, who shall remain nameless, that is always negative. Her spouse tried to reach me by cell phone today, and my phone had died, so I didn’t even know they had tried to call. There was a 20 second voice mail on my phone when I got enough charge to turn it back on. I listened to the message and realized it wasn’t really a message so much as not having disconnected the call after the voicemail picked up. In the background I hear my name and that I hadn’t answered, and then I hear the negative person say, something to the effect that I was probably doing something I wasn’t even asked to do instead of what I was supposed to be doing.  Now if I call someone during the work day and they let the call go to voicemail for whatever reason, I assume they are busy and can’t answer the phone right now. I do not automatically think of a hateful negative response that was in no way called for as to why the person didn’t answer or what they might or might not be doing instead of answering my call. There was no reason for this person to offer such negative and hateful comments. I’m not sure why they didn’t just call the land line when I didn’t answer on my cell. I had already told the person who tried to call not an hour earlier that my phone was all but dead, but for some reason they insist on calling the cell phone at least part of the time.

I am always hearing negative comments about how people who look like them don’t get treated fairly. Yet this person never stops to consider that perhaps the way they treat others has more bearing on the way they get treated than the color of their skin. One time, we went out to lunch as a group of four to a nice upscale bistro. The front of the small interior of the restaurant was crowded and loud. The hostess seated us in a spacious table in the very back of the dining area and I was glad for the peace and quiet that table afforded as the busy tables had young kids and were too noisy for my tastes anyway. But no, Miss Negative decided right away that we were seated in the back because of the color of their skin. We were looking over the menu to see what we wanted to order and she kept making comments like, “I don’t see anything that sounds good, we should just leave and go somewhere else.” We all had no problem finding any number of yummy sounding offerings from the menu and said we were ready to order. Finally she calmed down and placed her order. The food did take an extremely long time to come out, during which we heard a steady stream of negativity coming from her mouth. She had no idea how miserable she was making the rest of us, it was all about her. I for one was glad we were seated in the back so nobody could overhear her constant ranting.

The food finally came and right away she starts looking for something to complain about. One of our co-workers had ordered fruit as the side item. It came out on the plate with his sandwich like any other side item might have. She jumped on that saying how the fruit should have been in a bowl so the grapes didn’t roll around all over the plate. She made some comment about not wanting to bring us any spare dishes probably thought we would steal them. Then the bill finally arrived and they put cash down to pay for all of our meals. There was some change due to come back, but apparently the wait-staff at this place was no better at counting change than those who work fast food, because she gave us at least ten dollars too much back. Miss Negative was complaining about that too, although the waitress was very thankful when she pointed out the mistake. Once we left she grumbled about how she should have just kept the extra for the terrible service we got and how they treated them so bad. Honestly, we were all happy to get out of there and get back to work. The only one who had behaved badly during that lunch was Miss Negative herself.

There are so many other examples of how negative this person is on a very regular basis, but this is enough negativity for today.  (770 words)

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March 4 2015

Floating Loans

When we were kids we worked. I got a paper route delivering the Indianapolis News six days a week from the time I was eleven until I had two years in when I was thirteen. Mom made us keep the News route for two years so we would qualify to get the scholarships the newspaper offered. Supposedly if you carried the morning paper, The Indianapolis Star, you had to have had your route for two years or more and still have it at the time you graduated from high school. If you carried the afternoon paper, you just had to have had a route for two years to qualify. So we were bullied into keeping our routes until our two years had passed. My brother and I each had half of a sort of rough apartment complex called the Country Club Apartments located near Troy Avenue and Brill Road on the near south side of the city. We had a lot of trouble with people moving out without paying their bills. We always had pocket money and got pretty good at saving a portion of our income, even going so far as to open savings accounts at Indiana National Bank where there was a nearby branch at US 31 and National. If I recall correctly, at one point these savings accounts were paying eight percent interest, unheard of these days.

When mom would go grocery shopping, an almost nightly occurrence, we would often beg to tag along. Mom would be in the checkout line and invariably come up a few dollars short of the amount on the register. She would look down at us, at least I know she did it to me, and say, “Can you float me a loan?” We would gladly hand over the few dollars needed if we had it, proud that we could help out. This happened often, and eventually I learned not to carry much cash with me or not to go along at all, or I would suddenly not have any pocket money to spend at my discretion. Mom was pretty cool about it. She kept track of how much she had borrowed from us on a piece of paper she kept in her cigarette case. I did, eventually, get “paid back” in the spring of 1984, when I wanted to buy my first car, a 1974 Dodge Colt Wagon that was a dull chartreuse green. It was $795 dollars and I had part of that amount saved, but mom and dad came up with the amount they owed me from all the floated loans over the years to pay the rest of the money toward the car. Looking back, I’m not sure if floating these loans wasn’t some devious trick to get us to save our money unknowingly. We ought the car and got it home then took it to the mechanic for the once over. It turned out that what looked like just a lot of rust on the rounded insides of the body under the hood was actually rust on the frame of the car and required some pretty serious welding on of additional metal to make the car drivable. Dad was a barber, and not exactly mechanically inclined. I was a senior in high school before I got the Colt and then it took quite a while to get it fixed up and drivable. I had gotten my learner’s permit when I was fifteen and taken driver’s education which I had to pay for myself to the tune of over three hundred dollars. I got my license as soon as I was eligible after turning sixteen. Then mom and dad informed me that they could not afford to pay for auto insurance on both me and my older sister and since she had more driving experience they were giving it to her, so from the time I got my license at barely sixteen until late in my senior year two years later, I was not allowed to drive at all. I was upset, but what could I do? They couldn’t afford it, so I couldn’t drive. It never occurred to me to ask if I could pay the cost myself or even how much it would be. They never offered that option either. It wasn’t like my sister had a car to drive, she could drive mom’s nine passenger station wagon when mom wasn’t using it and that was it. The benefit to my parents, especially mom, was that my sister could drive to the store to grab a few items or pick one of us younger siblings up from an after-school event if need be and mom could get on with making dinner for the family. My sister was likely honored to be entrusted with this added responsibility and mom was likely thrilled at the freedom another driver afforded her. Then I got the car and was about to begin working the summer between high school and college and suddenly me having insurance was a necessity that could no longer be avoided. I had a car and was able to drive myself back and forth to work, pump and pay for my own gas and be responsible for my own car repairs. I loved that little wagon! It represented adulthood, freedom and responsibility to me. We probably never should have bought it. Although the body looked fairly decent and the interior was in good shape, with the rust on the frame members, it most likely belonged in a junk yard. It served me well for a couple of years before the engine gave out and it simply wasn’t worth putting that kind of money into it, so it did end up in the junk yard after all. One never forgets their first car. (965 words)

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March 3 2015

Youthful Activities

When I was growing up, I was one of four kids in a family with two parents. I was a bit of a minority because my parents were both my blood parents and still married to each other. All my siblings were full siblings, not steps or half siblings in our family. Both my parents graduated from high school and valued education for us kids. They always expected us to do our best no matter what we were doing. Mom always said as long as we could honestly say we had done our very best it was good enough. We were all good kids and did well in school. The three of us girls were avid readers reading most anything we could get our hands on. My brother read well enough, but never seemed to take to it like us girls did. I can still remember mom yelling at us older two girls to get our noses out of the books we were reading and help her clean the house. This usually happened on a Saturday mid-morning.

Mom had a system for assigning who cleaned what area of the house. She had four kids and areas to be cleaned each week, so she made up a chart and set up a rotating schedule. We each had a turn cleaning each area once every four weeks. We got our cleaning assignments that first week and were told the rules. We had to clean our area once that week and if we didn’t clean it, we would have to keep that area and get the next area to clean also for the next week. Whoever was supposed to rotate into the area you didn’t clean would get the week off from cleaning. This almost never happened, because after the first person messed up by not cleaning and we figured out Mom meant what she said, we knew we better just clean our assigned area each week. I used to like when it was my turn for the bathroom because it was such a small room it didn’t take all that long to clean it and have it looking really good. That chart is still inside the cabinet door where Mom taped it all those years ago, written in red ball point ink on a 4 x 6 index card, a little piece of parenting history err genius just waiting to be discovered.

Mom was full of parenting wisdom. With four kids, she had a rule that we could each be in only one activity. My older sister and I were in Girl Scouts and the younger brother and sister played Little League. That rule changed when we got to high school. Mom didn’t seem to mind how many activities we were in then as long as we found our own rides to and from or walked. She worked at Stokley Van Camp’s (which later became Quaker Oats) when we were in high school and her work hours, whether by her choice or not, were from 7:30am to 4pm. She was happy to drop us at school on her way to work as long as we were ready to go when she needed to leave the house, and more than willing to stop by the school on her way home from work to pickup any of us who were outside waiting for a ride a little after 4pm. She made it clear she wasn’t waiting around on us. If we wanted a ride we would be waiting and watching for her to pull up and ready to jump in and go. If we weren’t there, that was fine, but she wasn’t waiting on us. Sometimes we had band that went until later and she would run errands while we were finishing up then come by and get us so we could be home at a decent hour to help with dinner or do our chores. She would often bring us back and drop us off for play practice of an evening, then come back and pick us up at nine or ten when it was over. We just had to make sure we let mom know what we had going on and where we needed to be. We had to be flexible enough to be willing to arrive early or stay late. A lot of our extra curricular activities met before school so getting dropped off around 7am was great.

If we didn’t have a meeting to go to we could always sit and read or do homework in the band hall or go to the cafeteria to meet up with out friends. During my freshman year I was not in a lot of clubs and such because I was so tired of doing the same things as my older sister, so if she was in it I avoided it. I was tired of being her little sister and expected to be just like her. I wanted to be seen and appreciated for who I was not because I was next in line after my older sister. I know it got much worse by the time my brother got to high school because there were two of us to live up to. There were high standards to live up to too. The older three of us were all a year and a half apart in age but in school the oldest was one year ahead of me, then my brother was 2 years behind me in school with our younger sister following three years behind him. All four of us graduated from high school in the 1980s, 1983, 1984, 1986 and 1989. The older three of us were all in band together for one year. There is a photo taken of all of us in our band uniforms standing together outside the house. I wasn’t very musical, probably the least talented musically of all of us. I finally joined band my junior year after taking a beginning band class for a semester. I was never good at sight-reading music. I knew the basics and could figure it out if given enough time, but it was a slow painful process for me. I would write the letters of the notes above my music and then write the letters of the notes in permanent marker on the various notes on my bells for marching band and I could keep up that way until I had the music memorized. I guess they needed bodies more than they needed musically talented students. I was willing, able and teachable, so they took me on and let me play. I always knew I wasn’t good and sometimes had to fake my way through performances rather than mess up where everyone would know and hear my mistakes. (1,127 words)

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March 2 2015

Fish

When we were kids, our mother used to breed tropical fish. In the basement, she had built a framework of two by fours into very sturdy shelves for the aquariums to sit on. There were fluorescent lights above the top shelf. Most of the tanks had their own hoods on them. She would get these boxes (in the mail I think). They were brown corrugated cardboard with red printing on them. The boxes were about twenty inches square and maybe ten inches tall. Inside each box was a Styrofoam liner that was maybe three quarters of an inch thick and form fitted to the inside of the cardboard box. There was a lift off fitted lid to the Styrofoam making it insulated like a Styrofoam cooler. She would get boxes of fish inside these foam containers. I think they came in bags like you get when you buy fish in the pet stores, but I can’t picture that part like I can the boxes. Maybe I can see the boxes in my mind because they were so sturdy and thus lived a very long life storing stuff in our basement. I think most of her tanks were twenty gallon long tanks. I remember her having silver and black striped angel fish about the size of a half dollar. She had guppies and mollies too. There were orange and black lyre-tailed mollies, black mollies and fancy, fan tailed guppies. She also seemed to have a lot of snails and cory catfish. I don’t remember what she did with the fish she raised. As I look back, I assume it must have been one of the many ways she had found to earn extra money, but I don’t remember her selling the fish to anyone. Maybe she raised them to sell at pet stores, I’m just not sure about that. She always loved having bright colored tropical fish around. Because we had the fish tanks, I got to be the one to take the turtle home from our classroom tank when our kindergarten teacher went on maternity leave and didn’t plan to come back to teach that school year. I think her name was Mrs. Rider. We had this cute little turtle that swam around in an aquarium with fish I think. I don’t remember much about the turtle itself, just feeling like the winner of the luckiest kid contest for being the one to get to take it home. Perhaps that is why I was so willing to allow Austin to keep the turtle that our former neighbor, Mary’s dog had cornered in her kitchen. We had a lot of work and research to do to keep it because we were unsure whether it was a land turtle or an aquatic turtle. We got Gilligan when he was about the size of a silver dollar. We put him in a small two gallon tank. He grew and grew each time he outgrew his tank, we would put him in a bigger one and he would grow exponentially almost overnight. We finally learned not to be in such a hurry to upgrade the size of his tank. We also quickly realized that Gilligan is a snapping turtle. We should have had sense enough to release it as soon as we figured that out. But, in almost all things, hind-sight is twenty-twenty. Now we have a Frisbee sized snapping turtle in a forty gallon breeder tank, and keeping it clean is a chore nobody enjoys. (582 words)

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March 1 2015

How I Learned to Crochet 

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This is the story of how I learned to crochet. Many years ago, before my daughter, who is now twenty one years old, was born, I took a class to learn to crochet fabric into a rug. I worked at the JoAnn Fabrics store in Greenwood then and found a beautiful madras plaid in bold turquoise, red, yellow and orange colors. It was on clearance for only one dollar a yard. So I bought the ten yards the instructions called for, took it home and washed it then ironed it and tore it into strips, sewed all the strips end to end, then the long strip had to be folded in half and ironed again, then wrapped into a ginormous all of fabric, that ended up looking a lot like a football as I recall. All this prep work had to be done before the class. I got the basics down during the one class session, then was turned loose to finish the project on my own. Once the second baby, my daughter, was born, there was very little time to work on things like crochet and they project got put away in a closet and forgotten. Many years later, I found it and had a little free time so I tried rereading the instructions from the class to figure out how to finish the rug, but could make very little sense of the written instructions. So, I took the size N wooden crochet hook out of the last stitch I had out in and gently pulled a stitch out thinking I could, perhaps, reverse engineer it and figure out how to put more stitches in that way. I took out first one stitch, that didn‘t help, maybe if I do it again and pay closer attention I will get it. Nope, the second stitch didn’t make it any clearer so I repeated the reverse engineering experiment several more times with pretty much the same results until I realized I had to stop before I unraveled everything I had previously crocheted. I reread the instructions in case they would make more sense after the reverse engineering experiment, but it was no use. I was stuck. I couldn’t go forward and didn’t want to continue going backward, so I was really and truly stuck. So I wrapped the part of the rug that was done back around the football shaped bundle of unstitched fabric and put it back into the bag to deal with another day. I thought about that unfinished rug often and felt like a failure for not finishing it and not being smart enough to figure out what to do to get going and finish it up. Then I remembered the unfinished rug again as Thanksgiving was upon us and we were getting ready to meet up with my extended family for a group meal before going to my in-laws for the second round of eating for the holiday. I figured I might be able to get my Aunt Mary to help me figure out how to continue and finish the rug. So after the food was eaten and things were calm again I asked Aunt Mary if she knew how to crochet, and she said of course she did. I knew she made things with yarn, we had the granny square multi-colored (turquoise, brown and sunshine yellow or maybe pink) tank top style vests, and red, white and blue ponchos that she had made but I was completely unclear on whether these items had been knitted or crocheted. She asked what I needed help with and I showed her my half-finished rug project. She looked at it for a while and seemed hesitant. When I asked her if she could help she said that she had never worked with anything on this big of scale before but she thought she could help me. After a couple of fumbling attempts with the big wooden hook and the thick folded fabric she got it going and showed me how to continue. I decided then and there that I was going to keep at it until that rug was finished, which would be when I ran out of the fabric. So I sat at the table and while my cousins and aunts looked at the lack Friday ads from the newspaper and planned where they might shop the next day, I kept adding stitch after stitch to that rug until finally, I was within a few inches of the end of the fabric. I realized I didn’t know what to do to finish it so it wouldn’t unravel, so I went back to Aunt Mary for a last bit of advice and she helped me to finish it off. I was so proud of my newly finish rug, I gladly handed it to anyone who asked so all could see that I wasn’t just a starter any more, now I was a finisher too!

The next time I considered doing anything with crochet was after seeing something online about making yarn out of old t-shirts, called tarn. They showed how it could be used to crochet rugs, and my mind told me I could do that since I already had one crochet rug under my belt. I did a lot of research on just how to cut the tarn and found several websites with instructions and links to YouTube videos to show me how. I also found many videos on how to crochet on YouTube and bookmarked several to come back to after I had my tarn ready. I put out a call to my friends that if they were decluttering old t-shirts I wanted them. One of the ladies gladly gave me enough t-shirts to fill a big Rubbermaid tub. I sorted them by fabric content and was excited to see a whole batch of Old Navy 4th of July shirts in various patriotic colors. I had red, maroon, navy, light blue, and a few gray heather shirts. There were eight size medium and one size extra-large in gray. So I decided a patriotic rug was just the thing. So I got all the t-shirts cut and all the tarn rolled into little balls, then went back to the internet to find the videos on how to crochet with tarn. It still looked easy enough so I was game to get started. Red seemed like a good color for the center, so I watched the video about chain stitching and got that part done, then watched the one on making ovals and learned I would need to increase in the corners to make it come out an oval. So I worked and worked on it and finished that rug after only about five hours of crocheting. It was somewhat less than flat though, so I took it to work and laid it out on the table and put two cases of paper on top of it to make it lay flat. We left it like that for several days then took the cartons of paper off to see if it had worked. It had worked to an extent, it was flatter, but I knew I had done something wrong. I was so happy I had figured the whole thing out with only the help of YouTube videos and had finished the project this time, but I knew I would have to take some of it out and redo it but wasn’t sure what I had done wrong or how to fix it, just that it must have something to do with the increases at the corners. So I put it away until I could figure it out. I wasn’t happy with the fact that it looked more like an infant sized basket than a flat oval rug. I missed having Aunt Mary to ask, she had died several years ago.

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Then one day I was searching the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library’s class and workshop offerings and noticed that the library near our house was having a monthly stitchers group meeting on the first Saturday of each month. It said, “College Avenue Stitchers – Adults are invited to join other knitters and crocheters for a fun social gathering. Attendees can bring their own projects and supplies, but free help and lessons will be available for those who are interested.” Hey, this sounds like just what I need to get help fixing my rug! So the next meeting was the first Saturday of December 2014 and I made sure I was there. The ladies were very nice and welcoming. We introduced ourselves and told what we were currently working on, so I showed them my rug and told them I needed their expert opinions on how to fix it. They seemed hesitant to tell me that I needed to take out most of it, but I told them I had figured that out but didn’t know what I had done wrong or how to keep it from happening again, so they helped me figure out that about seven and a half of the nine shirts needed to be pulled out and re-stitched. Denise the leader and expert in all things knit or crochet was super helpful and we decided that while I had thrown in an extra stitch every now and then, I simply hadn’t increased enough in the corners to get it to lay down flat. So, after making a huge volleyball sized tarn ball out of all I had unwoven, I started crocheting the tarn again making sure to add extra stiches in the corners more often this time. I told them all not to worry I was happy to redo it so I could learn from my experience and was so glad to have found this group. I went home that day and worked a few more rows in and then picked it up from time to time throughout the month, but time in December is hard to come by with all the holiday stuff, so I didn’t have it finished when the first Saturday in January came around. I went to the meeting and they welcomed me back and were glad to see I had made so much progress on the rug. I sat there and finished it that day, so they told me I needed to find my next project and come prepared for next month. 

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Between the January and February meetings, I looked for crochet books and had requested a few on hold from the library. They had told me to look for books geared toward teaching children to crochet as they were easier to understand. They also promised to teach me how to read and follow patterns. I had told my sister that if they came across any yard or knitting and crochet supplies in their adventures buying storage units that they didn’t want, I would gladly take it off their hands. So she told me she had a bag of yarn and some assorted needles or hooks or whatever for me. On the first Saturday in February, I went to the library knowing that a book called “Crochet for Kids” was waiting on hold for me. I also went armed with the yarn and other supplies my sister had gladly passed along to me. Denise helped me to start the hat from the book waiting for me that day and I finished making the hat within the week. It had called for a size K hook and I had used a J because I didn’t have a K. The had was supposed to fit a kid about ten years, but the white hat I had made following the patter except I had left off the bill, was very small. 

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I spent the next week searching the internet for hat patterns. The criteria for my search was that the patterns had to be easy, use single crochet and most of all be free. I created a binder with various hat patterns but had only found one that looked doable to me without help. So on Friday, the 20th after work, I got out the red yarn from my sister and got to work. The beginning was a little rough, but after a few rows I became more confident and kept going. I kept at it little by little and finally finished it on Monday night the 23rd. 

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 It wasn’t perfect but I was planning on donating these hats to homeless people or something and figured it would be warm and welcome even if it weren’t quite perfect. The next one would be better. My friend Ruth had brought me a bag of yarns she was decluttering on Saturday and they were all variegated. I was excited to get started on my next hat. I picked a pretty pasted variegated yard with no wrapper, but it felt like the red yarn, so I figured it was fine. I decided that since I had used the K hook like the white hat pattern had called for on the red hat and it came out big, I should use the H hook that this pattern called for and see how that turned out. There wasn’t a whole skein, so I figured I was going to call the hat done when the yarn ran out. I worked on the 3rd adult hat all that week and finally finished it just after work on Friday. Hey! I had made two hats from start to finish in just a week! The pastel hat was a bit snug, but looked darned good to me.  

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So Friday night the 27th I started the next hat, this time with a Red Heart rainbow colored variegated yarn and since the H hook had made the hat snug, I decided this one would be with the I hook. That is where I am now, crocheting the rainbow hat. Over twenty years since I first attempted to crochet and I now have two rugs and three and a half hats as my claim to crochet fame. (2,341 words)

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Boye Crochet Dude Ergonomic Aluminum Crochet Handle (as shown above)

This handle, shown in the photo above, is AMAZING! It is the only thing that helps me crochet without carpel tunnel bothering me so much.  The Post-it Arrow Flags in Assorted Bright Colors help me to keep track of where I am on the pattern.

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