When I wrote the first one, Kaleb wasn't even four months old yet. Haley was only ten—ten! Jake was almost seven and Nathan was in kindergarten. We still had all four of our parents with us, although my dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's very shortly after.

I was a stay-at-home mom completely enjoying my last baby and I had no idea I would one day become a librarian. I weighed twenty pounds more than I do now, I loved ice cream, and I drank at least one 44-ounce Pepsi every day. I hadn't yet run a marathon or hiked timp.

I thought that by the time I was 40 I would have surely written my novel.

I haven't, but I have managed to write 999 blog posts. This is my one thousandth. And I also had the idea that my blog would become a wildly popular purveyor of intelligent thought. The popularity? Not so much. The intelligent thought? I hope so, but not always.

There was the post where I made fun of an author and then the author left me a comment.

The one where I explained what is like to be partly Mormon.

And this one about Mormon Mommy Blogs which I am extremely fond of. Even if it's snarky. Especially because it's snarky.

The post with my reading philosophy.

Several about people dying.

I wrote a 100 things list (which I've been thinking about doing again) and a 50 gratitudes list.

I did a Christmas Writing Challenge and a Use Your Stuff Challenge.

I've written about a lot of different things.

And while I'm still working on that novel (and some essays and some short stories and even a few poems) and while I have a tiny blog readership (translation: I appreciate every. single. reader!) I will continue to blog as well. Putting my thoughts out into the world helps me organize them, express them, understand them, and value them more than I would have otherwise. Here's to 1,000 more posts!

And tell me: how long have you blogged and would you ever stop?

made me cry.

I left to take an envelope that needed to be postmarked tomorrow to the post office, just to make sure. When I got out of our cul-de-sac and onto the street that pulls onto a larger and busier street, I looked left—which is east. I looked west, and the very end of the sunset was lingering on the mountains across the lake, but I looked left again because: the moon. It had just barely made it over Cascade mountain and was a wedge of just-barely-light behind the thinning clouds. I turned left and, as I drove east, the clouds disappated and there was the moon, full, and enormous the way it is when it first rises.

I have been heartsore lately. Perhaps this story explains why. Last week I was at the scrapbook store, waiting for some layouts to be scanned, and a woman in her late fifties struck up a conversation with me. She asked how old my kids were, and when I said I had three teenagers, she literally touched me. She put her hand on my shoulder and she said, with the greatest compassion I've felt from a complete stranger in perhaps ever, "Oh my. Three teenagers all at once. That is tough on your self esteem and on your soul."

Don't get me wrong. I love my kids with all my heart. I am blessed beyond measure that they are really great kids. I've always held the opinion that so long as they make it through high school without completely melting down like I did, we'll call that successful teenageness and move on, and I think we will achieve that. (Knocking on wood, crossing fingers, watching out for black cats and being wary of ladders.)

But adolescence is hard. It's hard on everyone, as what happens to one person in a family really happens to the entire family. I love them and I want them to be happy but I also desperately want to form a relationship with them that will last longer than the time they leave for college. I want them to want to have me in their lives but where I am, standing outside that wall that teenagers are so adept at building, it feels like they won't. That I will let each one of them fly away, but they won't fly back.

So: heartsore. And that moon, somehow, the way it grabbed the very last light from the sunset and seemed to melt the clouds with it, even though it was that cold, distant light the moon has—I don't know. I can't say how, or even why, exactly, but it made everything in me that was tight and quivering, dry and desperate, liquefy. It was that beauty is impartial; it exists in the face of misery or joy. It was that it was so far away. It was that it was light. 

It gashed me open and everything melted out and all I could do was pull over and look at the moon and have a good cry.

My friend Amy is hosting a use-your-stash week at WCS, so I've been thinking about the topic even more than usual, so bear with me for a ranty little post.

Yesterday I needed to fit something in my drawer of brown embellishments. I dug around a bit, found what I needed, and then started paying attention. Because, you know: holy cow. There's a lot of brown stuff in that drawer. And there's a lot of stuff in my pink drawer, too. And the yellow one. Even the red (my least-favorite color) drawer has, yes, lots of stuff.

I found myself staring at my color drawers and imagining what it would be like if I used up all my stuff. How many layouts could I make? I daresay that, barring adhesive purchases, I could scrap well into the next decade of my life without buying anything.

When we were growing up, my mom had her sewing room. It was a basement bedroom that had a whole wall lined with built-in cabinets that held bottles of food. (She was a domestic goddess who could preserve nearly every food item you can imagine.) Food, and also fabric. Yards and yards and yards of fabric.

Some of it, I believe, is still down in the sewing room. Most of it, I'd dare say.

Because just like when you clean out your fridge and find a whole bunch of good intentions moldering away in the produce bin, crafty supplies are all about what we intend to do. We have every intention of using the ___________ we just bought (adorable flannel, perfect wool yarn that was 50% off, or, in my case, probably a sheet of alphas). We know just what we'll do. But life, alas, doesn't allow for unlimited crafting time. And good intentions, no matter how certain, just don't always get fulfilled, and then you forget why you bought that ___________, or you fall out of love with it or think it is embarrasingly dated, and your stash either builds and builds monumentally or drains your creative energy.

I don't want to leave this world with a teetering tower of unused scrapbook supplies.

I do want to leave this world with a good representation of my family's memories put down on paper combined with photographs.

So I reminded myself: the whole point of scrapping supplies is, you know, scrapbooking. Using the stuff! And then I used some of the things I found in my brown drawer. One of them (the alphas that spell "thanks") are from 2005. Like...way back when I was pregnant with Kaleb! I remember buying them for a layout I made with photos of Haley riding a horse at my friend Sophia's house, but when I made the layout I did something completely different.

(I have no idea why the K looks faded. It isn't in real life.)

Maybe here is a good place to point out that one way to use your older supplies is to combine them with something newer. (Eight-year-old alphas + those new-ish little Studio Calico hexagons, for example.) But really, the main point is that while I was sticking those old Scrapworks letters down I was asking myself Is it embarrassing to use a product that is eight years old?  And then I also answered: Gah, who cares? I keep thinking of something Stacy Julian said in a Paperclipping podcast a few weeks ago: something about how it doesn't matter at all, really, when you've made layouts and layouts and layouts for years, what the layout looks like. It doesn't matter. And she is exactly right: it doesn't. Because while the cute stuff is fun to use and to look at, all that matters is the basics: the photo, the story. Why do I make it so complicated?

So here's my challenge to you this week: use your stuff. Use some of it. It might not be the perfect stuff for that layout. Who cares? What matters is that you got it out of your drawer. What matters is that you use the stuff to tell the story.

(Also it matters that you don't go out as the crazy lady who hoarded paper and stickers, but probably that is a different post altogether.)

Related articles

Use Your Stuff Challenge #6: Product as Inspiration

write.

Welcome to "use your stash" week

Today I'm working on a project for Write Click Scrapbook, my March gallery contribution. I'm at the stage where I'm thinking gah, this is so not coming together like I wanted it to but I get that way with every project (scrapbook layout, essay, quilt) I make, so hopefully this is just a phase.

Or maybe I'll scrap half of it and go with more neutral tones, and that will be OK too. I'm using scraps for almost all of it anyway!

Here's a picture:

And some other blogs with sneaks:

Christine

Amy

Katie

Aliza

Valerie

Lisa O.

Francine

hmmmmm....seeing everyone else's wonderful stuff makes me think I might need to push myself a bit more!

Happy scrapping!

One of my new year's resolutions this year has been to read more poetry. I'm annoyed with myself that poetry even has to be a resolution—because I love it, but somehow I have gotten out of the habit of reading it very often. I can't say why, exactly. Part of it is that, working as a librarian, I am exposed to so many, many, many books. There are so many things I want to read. (Right now, for example, I have 89 library books checked out just on my card. Fifteen of those are overdue. Ten or so are Kaleb's, four are Nathan's. I probably won't get through 10% of them.) I've started having a sort of reading ADD: there are so many choices that I can't settle on one thing. This week, I did finish a book (Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo, which was good until I realized I was being strung along to the incomplete, this-is-a-trilogy ending that all teen fantasy has these days), but I also started two different novels (Finding Camlan by Sean Pidgeon (loving so far—a literary adventure about Arthur) and Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner (which I'm certain I need to save for another time when I'm not feeling so distracted.) I started a biography about the Bronte Sisters (The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne by Catherine Reef), a book about writing (Good Prose by Tracey Kidder), and three recipe books. Not to mention flipping through the most recent Typography Annual. Oh! And Miss Peregrine's Home for Unusual Children, which I am trying to read on the Kindle app on my cell phone just to prove to myself that I can actually get through an entire e-book, a feat I have never managed before.

I need a better system for prioritizing my reading desires. And that's the entire problem right there: I want to read it all, right now. So I bring home too much and get overwhelmed and then don't finish anything.

Ironically, while this is the thing that pushed the reading of an abundance of poetry out of my life, it is also a frustration that poetry dissolves. Because here's the thing: you read a poem, and then you are finished. You might not read the entire book of poems (which is OK because not every poem is going to connect with you anyway), but you finish the poems you do read. Even if you read a poem three or four times, and think about it for awhile, and maybe put a sticky note on one you want to keep with you forever (or bend down the corner of the page, depending upon whether or not it's your book or the library's), you have time to finish it. A poem is a very small, concise, and contained reading experience.

Why haven't I had more of it in my life?

But since January, mixed in with all that other frustrated reading has been poems. I've read poems out of the 2012 Best American Poetry (one of my overdue books) and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, and a few out of The 20th Century in Poetry, which weighs perhaps five pounds. I have a line stuck in my head from a poem by rachal Hadas that I cannot say where I read: "proceeding down the avenue clutching a clue, love’s puzzle not yet, not ever done" which at odd and random times has been a sort of comfort. Somewhere else I read a poem that said our entire life is simply one word, spoken so slowly from our birth to our death that no one can hear it but God. I can't find the poem, though, and perhaps I have changed it in my head, but that is OK because the image stays with me.

Some poems I don't understand completely but I love anyway, like "Shabistari and the Secret Garden" by Robert Bly, from the May 2005 Poetry Magazine, which is partly about Sufi philosophy but includes these lines:

When a poem takes me to that place where
No story ever happens twice, all I want
Is a warm room and a thousand years of thought.

and

Those high spirits don't prove you are
A close friend of truth, but you have learned to drive
Your buggy over the prairies of human sorrow.

And what I don't understand or connect to doesn't matter because I have those images to play back in my mind, to think about, to puzzle over, to welcome as phonemes in my life's one word.

Others I understand in their entirety just as their one perfect image breaks me open:

Down here, with my long wait for wings to grow
I'm slow accepting the stars' chart for me,
the blind track written in my sky at birth
(from "More than Twice, More than I Can Count" by Peter Cooley)

and

Isn't her silence, finally, loving? And yours
not entirely self-serving? Hasn't the time come,
                         once again, not to talk about it?
(from "The Imagined" by Stephen Dunn)

and

I am variable, exquisite, tough,
Even useful; I am subtle; all this is enough.
I don't want to be a temple, says the tree.
But if you don't behave, I will be.
(from "Anti-Romantic" by Marie Ponsot)

and

Only in calendars that mark no Spring
Can there be weather in the mind
That moves to you again as you are now
(from "Eight Variations" by Weldon Kees)

And I am reminded by reading poetry why I love reading poetry. Yes, it is the finishing of something. But more, it is the discovery of the bits of my own wrecks in other writer's worlds. It is the deep peace of knowing: oddly enough, and in ways that hardly match, someone else knows. It is the tribe I want to be a part of.

I decided awhile ago that I don’t really like using chipboard embellishments on my layouts. I can’t really explain exactly why, except for it seems like 90% of them don’t stick like they’re supposed to, or they curl in that wide, strange way that requires a stack of books to flatten out. I don’t love how the thickness makes dents on the page next to the chipboarded one, and, well...I just don’t love it in my books. (Which is to say: not that there’s anything wrong with chipboard.)

I have decided that my not-liking of chipboard is OK. Yes, it's an entire genre of scrapbooking supplies I am rejecting. (Mostly.) But as I am certain there is no law that says I must buy supplies I don't love, I'm being bold and decisive; I'm taking action. Well, if "not buying chipboard anymore because I know it mostly sits in my drawer feeling unloved" is taking action, then yes! I am taking action!

The last time I did a big purge, I got rid of quite a bit of my chipboard. (I sent it to a friend who loves it!) But I still have a few packages I loved despite the chipboard format, and this TCP Studios alpha was one of my exceptions:

Mostly I kept it because I loved the color combination—the different shades of blues mixed with spring green and a titch of red—and didn’t want to forget about it. Because sometimes you can find inspiration in the oddest places, but really: how does one organize ideas?

By keeping them in your stash!

I didn’t just keep those chipboard alphas. I also used them on a layout, which really almost feels like getting a BOGO: inspiration and actual product stuck down on a scrapbooking page. Which makes me feel better as, I confess: the recent new releases have sent me on a little bit of a scrappy buying frenzy. New paper! Some new alphas! (Although...is it just me, or does it seem like there are fewer new alphas? I think it’s Silhouette-inspired, as once you own one you can make a bajillion alphas all on your own if you want. So maybe alpha stickers aren’t selling as well?) A few rolls of washi! Some solid twine, too, which I just got this afternoon and have already used on a layout with you can see HERE.

The product I haven’t bought? Chipboard!

The challenge:

1. Stir through your drawers/boxes/storage compartments to find some sort of embellishment that’s still in its packaging.

2. Use it as an inspiration piece for a layout.

3. Use at least one other "old" supply.

3. Bonus points if you also use some of the embellishments on your layout!

Here’s mine:

Those alphas are old. So is the patterned paper. In fact, I know all of these supplies are sort-of old because I remember buying them at Roberts—the craft store here that went out of business last January. Still sad about that. But happy at using some older stuff. And...I love these photos of Jake. I loved that entire afternoon, in fact, and have scrapped about it more than once twice ok maybe five or six different layouts. It was a good afternoon. Notice the date—almost exactly five years ago. I hope we have a beautifully-chilly/warm February 18 this year, too. I'm ready for some fresh air.

Anyway! Hook me up if you play along! And, if no playing along is in your future, at least tell me: Is there a scrapbooking supply you don't really love?

(PS, if you were wondering "does this layout make Amy wish she could write in a straight line?" the answer is yes. I wish I could write in a straight line. Maybe when I'm a grown-up I'll manage it...)

First off, the winner of the spot in the Angie's Grammar-Free workshop is:

Celeste! I'll email you on how to sign up, Celeste. Comment number 1 sometimes really does win! :)

Yesterday I turned on the disposal and it made that horrible clanking sound that means "something is in here that shouldn't be!" I tend to hear that sound quite often because I have an irrational fear of sticking my fingers in the garbage disposal. I imagine I'll knock something on the inside, making it turn on accidentally, and then, slice and crunch: no more fingers. (And how could I blog without fingers?)

I took a deep breath and convinced myself to fish out whatever was down there (after turning it off, of course!). It was the stainless steel thingee (the official, real name) that holds the blade of my cheese grater onto the bowl. Sweet! Metal parts against metal blades, I'm certain that's good for all involved...

Jake was in the kitchen when this happened and he heard me sigh and mutter under my breath something about all my recent kitchen disasters. He asked what they'd been and I started to list them off for him, and I realized: I really have had quite a few lately. Maybe because I'm trying to cook more? Who knows. Here are my most recent messes/accidents/disasters:

• Metal thingee-in-the-disposal incident.
• Not five minutes before the metal-thingee-in-the-disposal incident, I let the rolling pin roll off the counter and clatter down on the kitchen floor. It made an enormous dent on the floor. (The rolling pin itself is fine. My friend Chris gave it to me at my bridal shower...that thing has rolled out literally hundreds of batches of rolls, cookies, and pizzas. I still love it.)
• Making last night's pizza dough (because homemade pizza—and sugar cookies, might as well overload on the carbs while the mess is already out!—have become our Valentine's Day tradition, along with seemingly everyone else in Utah County, if my desperate search for a package of pepperoni is any proof) I dumped in way too much flour all at once, then didn't put the Bosch lid down tight. Flour everywhere!
• Sunday afternoon pancakes. Nathan was pouring the pancake batter onto the griddle while I made the buttermilk syrup and simultaneously whipped up a double batch of lemon bread (because, again: the best time to bake something is right after you've made something different, as the flour and sugar and vanilla and baking powder are already out). He poured it too fast and the batter went everywhere: across the griddle, behind the toaster oven, down the face of the dishwasher. I had just put the baking soda into the syrup, which makes it foam up, and when I turned around to grab some paper towels for the batter, I gave the syrup just enough time to boil over. All over the stove I had just cleaned the night before. And the day before that. Pancake batter all over one counter, sticky syrup bubbling all over the stove burners, and Kaleb sitting at the other counter telling me how hungry he was—I made everyone exit the kitchen right this very second so they didn't see me explode.
• Hmmmm, I honestly don't know why I would've messed this up, but on Sunday afternoon while I was doubling the batch of lemon bread (and cleaning up burnt syrup from around the burners and cleaning up spilled and slightly-cooked pancake batter and placating hungry children) I did my baking math wrong and put in too much sour cream. It might have to do with the fact that I was measuring 32 ounces of sour cream using the four half-gone containers in my fridge; I tend to always feel like I'm out of sour cream and then buy another container when really, not out of sour cream. The bread ended up tasting OK, but it wasn't pretty my friend.
• For Saturday's dinner, I made shredded teriyaki chicken over coconut rice. (Someone, I won't name any names) hadn't done their kitchen job, so the pan I really should've used to make the sauce was buried under a sinkful of dishes waiting to be loaded into the dishwasher. (Could I have loaded them? Sure. Should I? Well, I don't think so. I think the person whose job was "load dishwasher" should've, you know, loaded the dishwasher.) So I used a smaller one. Big mistake: I let it boil over. Teriyaki sauce is sticky. Plus it meant we had less sauce than usual. And that burning sugar smell.
• Unloading the dishwasher (wait! do you see a pattern here? Because the same person who was supposed to load the dishwasher on Saturday was also supposed to unload it on Friday) on Friday morning before work, trying to rush, I dropped and broke a glass measuring cup. Really this wasn't a true disaster, as I've been meaning to buy a new one anyway. I want one with an extra-special feature: measurement markings that don't wash off. But still, glass is never fun to clean up. Also: dent.
• Cleaning out my spice cupboard last week, I knocked over a bottle of orange extract that happened to have a loose lid. Spattered orange extract everywhere. I keep finding little spots of it here and there. The kitchen smelled good though! (That is what I get for doing a cleaning project when I could've been doing something worthwhile, like scrapbooking. Or blogging. You know, with my fingers!)
• Eating dinner from Taco Bell on my 21st anniversary this week is sort-of a kitchen disaster. At least, to my children it is, as they don't love TB. Me? I will never turn it down. I know, it makes me less admirable in your eyes, less high-class and snooty. Less elegant and intelligent, but it's the truth: I love Taco Bell. (And let's face it, when you have 4 kids who need to be in 3 different places within thirty minutes of each other, a looming scrapbooking deadline, a little oral surgery to plan for, and a headache, you "celebrate" your anniversary just by not cooking—thus avoiding any real kitchen disasters—and acknowleding that a busy and happy family is the best celebration anyway.)
• Potential disaster, luckily averted: I left the pan of simmering spaghetti sauce to continue to simmer after we'd all eaten. And cleaned up. And showered and brushed teeth and went to bed. Yes, still simmering away, that little bit of left-over sauce I forgot about. Luckily I ran out of water before I fell asleep or we might've all been burned to death via spaghetti sauce, and wouldn't that be an odd way to go out for Kendell? (At least then he'd have a reason to hate it...)

Have you had any kitchen disasters lately?

Yesterday I:

Got up, made lunches, got kids off to school, went to Nathan's school for his schedule-planning meeting, took Haley's lunch money in, went to Walmart (where I learned the hard way to NEVER go to Walmart on a Tuesday, as it is double coupon day...I didn't even have one little tiny coupon), went to Old Navy, went to B+N, went to Archiver's, raced home to put everything away, scarfed some toast for lunch, went to work (where I got to sit in on a writing workshop hosted by Terry Tempest Williams which shall merit its very own post), came home and picked up Kendell, went to dinner with some of his work friends, went back to the library to get my copy of Refuge signed by T.T. Williams, went to Hobby Lobby to get some cardstock (my contribution to Kaleb's Valentine's Day party tomorrow), picked up In 'n Out for the kids, dropped the food off and then did some Valentunes order pick ups for Haley, came home and got everyone in bed, started a load of laundry, worked on a scrapbooking deadline, hung up the damp clothes, finished Kaleb's Valentine's Day box, and then (finally! and at a very late hour!) went to bed.

Which is sort of how all of my days have gone lately. And which is why I'm oh-so-late at actually sitting down to tell you about this BP class that you can win a seat in:

Angie Lucas (the instructor) is one of my favorite people in the scrapbooking world, because she's smart and funny and creative and she cares about words. And please: don't get caught up in the S word. You would like this class if you're a blogger, too. Or if you write in a journal. There's no rule that says you have to get all cutesty on me! Here is the info about the class:

Who's teaching this class? Hi, I'm Angie Lucas, word nerd extraordinaire, and I'll be your Grammar-Free Journaling instructor.
Is "grammar-free journaling" a thing, or did Angie Lucas make it up? Okay, okay, I made it up. The idea is to tell truly compelling stories in creative new formats using the fewest words possible—and to stress less about paragraph flow, sentence structure, transitions, and the rules of writing. What does Angie Lucas have against grammar? Absolutely nothing! I'm willing to bet that I love grammar even more than you do. But just in case you don't like it, I'll show you 12 useful strategies for skipping the grammar altogether.
Who is this "Angie Lucas" anyway? I'm the new Editorial Director at Big Picture Classes, a professional writer and editor since 1998, the founder of Ella Publishing Co., the former managing editor at Simple Scrapbooks magazine, and an average pianist (which is not at all relevant to this workshop).

Just leave me a comment telling me how your Tuesday went, and I'll draw a winner in the morning.

Which is good because the class starts tomorrow!

January 2013 in review:

• More than anything, this was a month of winter. Here in Utah we had record-breaking lows for 18 days, the worst smog inversion ever, and plenty of snow. The snow and even the cold temps were exactly right in my book. The smog, on the other hand, plays dirty tricks on me. I don't like it one bit.
• Also the month of dental work. Haley, Jake, and Nathan each had cavities (Jake's was his very first!). I went in for what I desperately hoped was only an old, cracked filling but was, in fact, a deeply cracked tooth. I didn't want a crown but I got one anyway. While they were in there already they fixed another cracked filling right next to the crown and then discovered that the tooth next to that one needed a filling. The plus side: all of my silver filings except one have been replaced with white ones. The down side: my lower left teeth still hurt. (Cue tooth dreams.)
• The Bigs all got straight As on their report cards. Go Bigs! (Cue a trip to Krispy Kreme.)
• Haley started working as an intern at a pharmacy. 180 hours later (sometime in March or April) she'll be able to take the pharmacy technician exam and then hopefully find a job. Also: she has a boyfriend. And for all the moms who have asked me in concerned voices if I am OK with that, let me just say: I am OK with that. I am actually thrilled with it. It is OK, in my mind, for teenagers to be in relationships.
• One morning, Jake ended up being late to school because we were fighting with the printer. (We desperately need a new laser printer, but I can't decide which one to get.) I ran the carpool in to the elementary school and then came back to pick him up—and I couldn't get my van up the driveway! It was a sheet of ice. So I left it on the street and went inside to put actual clothes on (one cannot check one's junior high student in at the office when one is still wearing pajamas and slippers, although one can drive the carpool in such attire!), giving Jake five gleeful moments of sliding down the driveway. He thought it was the best day ever!
• Nathan was totally excited for his Klondike. I don't get camping in the snow, but I will happily send him out! (Well, not really happily. I worry every second when either boy is gone to a scout campout as there are no women involved to keep things safe & practical.) Despite single digits, the anticipation was richly rewarded. He came home entirely wet!
• Kaleb hates coats more than anyone I've ever known. So our cold snap was tough for him. We had quite a few "I hate coats!" grumpy mornings.
• I read The Fault in Our Stars, When Katie Wakes, the Best American Poetry 2011, Charity Girls and some essays. I made progress on Kaleb and Jake's quilts; I made 12 layouts. I ran a dismal 24 miles and managed to make it to my sculpting class only twice. (On the other side of that equation, I think I drank about 5 gallons of hot chocolate.) I took almost no photos. I wrote the WRITE Saturday post for WCS and I'm thinking about doing a follow-up post  here about my scrapbooking process.

How was your January?