Making Connections

According to the British website alljoinin.com, the average British housewife would earn £30,000 were she actually paid for her labor. That's well over the actual average wage in Britain. At the current exchange rate, that's just under $60,000. That number has stayed amazingly consistent--this isn't the first time something like this has been calculated out.

So should homemakers be paid a wage? I say no--I mean, who's paying?--but we do deserve more legal protection than we have.

We've done it before-- if anyone is interested and no one else is organizing it, I'm happy to organize it. If someone else already started a thread on this, could someone tell me where it is?--read more

It's amazing. When you write about women and their lives, especially their work choices, you inevitably get the "What? You don't think I'm doing the right thing? How dare you!" people, often over innocuous comments. So I am compelled to issue the following, and will continue to issue it whenever anyone gets her panties in a twist:

I have spoken.

I only wash my hair a couple of times a week. It's so dry that if I did it more than that I'd have a brittle haystack on my head. So today was the first time I've washed my hair since I had it cut, and I even blew it dry. I never blow dry my hair--the dry thing, plus also I just never liked taking the time. I have the same blow dryer I left home with some 30 years ago, believe it or not.

It still looks pretty good. The main thing I noticed is that it seems to show my gray a lot more, shorter like this. Luckily I don't mind. I've earned each and every one of those damn things, and they didn't start coming in earnest until my 40s, unlike a close relative who shall not be named who started going gray at 18.

I walked down the street today to the barber shop on the corner and gave my hair to Locks of Love. He took off at least a foot, maybe more, and gave me a soft pageboy that I'm still getting used to. The hair is at that length where it falls into my collar, and I keep having to fight the impulse to flick it out. Pix when I get new batteries for the camera.

I just don't. I'm 46. I'm fat--but worse, I have a really weird shape now that I'm still not used to. I mean, I've always been fat, but this is different; my shape is foreign to me. My good points are no longer good. My once-shapely-even-for-a-fat-girl legs are lumpy and odd now, especially my ankles.

I used to have a pretty good idea how to dress myself, and often looked kinda cute. Now, I haven't got a clue. Things I think will look good fail miserably. I've gotten to the point where I've just given up and follow Gilda Radner's advice: I base my look on what doesn't itch.--read more

Thank you.

Hi,--read more

This is a reprint of a "Hacker Housewife" article I wrote for the TNH Newsletter (the subscription form is to the far right). Now seemed a good time to put it in the blog, too.

If you've spent any time at TNH lately, you may have noticed at the bottom of posts there's a line that says:

Bookmark/Search this post with:

...and then a bunch of weird links like delicious, stumble upon, sk*rt and digg.

What are these mysterious links? And why should you care?

Those links are to social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking is a way to share your bookmarks with others. It also allows you to keep your bookmarks in a central location, accessible from any device with a web browser. You can keep your links private, share them with a network of friends, or share them with the world.--read more

Nothing is better for my soul than getting together with like-minded women. Today I went downtown--by myself, yet!--to meet up with a bunch of Portland knit-bloggers at Knit Purl.

Knitting wackiness ensued. Projects were displayed, small very sweet dogs were petted (I sat next to Kelly Petkun! squeal!), mystery shawl progress was noted, yarn was fondled, Oregonian knit bloggers were introduced, and many cookies were consumed.

Knit Purl were WONDERFUL hosts, thanks to them! They even had door prizes, one of which I won--a hank of hand-dyed ShibuiKnits merino kid in a very faintly variegated auburn called Pagoda. Felicitous, considering I have piles of browns and auburns I need to use up!

Knit bloggers, let's do it again soon.

TNHer and Homestead Neophyte Phelan is about to blog for 24 hours straight to raise money for Farm Aid. She sent me this message:

Last year I did the same and had incentives for people. I was wondering if any of your readers would like to donate any of their crafts to the cause. ... I have an article up at The Modern Homestead and a little something up on my blog. I have 2 businesses sponsoring and will be happy to put up some link love to those that are willing to help out with incentives.

So there you have it. I'm donating some ebooks, and if you have anything going, I encourage you to do the same. Contact Phelan through her two blogs.

While I'm working on all this crap server stuff, I'm running across a lot of old articles I'd forgotten about. I thought I'd share some of them with you to give you something to read while I'm finishing this up--two by me, one by another.

• Five Ways to Avoid the Mommy Wars: Miriam Peskowitz's ideas on keeping our attention where it should be, rather than being distracted by the false "war" between women.
• Who's the Real Enemy? More from me on the mommy wars. This was originally written more than eight years ago, right around the time of the site's founding.
• The TNH Manifesto: This was also written around the time of the site's founding and I still believe every word.

Back to the salt mines.

PS: You like the graphic? It'll be coming out in a new line of Cafepress gear soon, with and without words.

My little sister Jennifer, aka Herbie, is 40 today. I'm astonished. She still looks about 12. And I'd give you photographic evidence of this, except I don't have a single dang photo of the kid on this computer! Take my word for it. Not a day over freshman year of high school, at most. That's my story.

Who's Herbie?
When I lived with roommates, it always cracked me up when I'd end a phone conversation with Jennifer. I'd say, "Bye, Herbie," and the roommate would say, "Who's Herbie?" and I'd say, "my sister." "Your sister's named HERBIE?!"

Jennifer is six years younger than me. When she was tiny, she loved Sesame Street. And her favorite character was Grover, especially the way his arms moved, spaghetti-like, on sticks. Grover's best friend was Herbert Birdsfoot. Grover would always greet Herbert with "Hey-a Her-bie bay-beee!" and a hearty smack on the back with his wobbly arms.

Jennifer would come up to me so often yelling "Heya Herbie bay-beee" and smacking me in a Grover-like fashion that I started calling her Herbie. She in turn called me Herb. We have been Herb and Herbie (but only to each other--no one else calls us that) ever since--something like 37 years. oy.

Anyway, happy birthday, Herbie bay-beee! I love you!

Why I love this man.

And this is the last either of us will speak about this for a while.

This Mother's Day, I had to put on a pair of latex gloves and clean out a chicken's impacted vent (if you're not squeamish, Google it; if you are, don't). Last Mother's Day, I died.

I think this year was better than last year.

Actually it was good to take stock of how far I've come. I spent a chunk of today sitting in the sun, weeding. Leonard came, along with our friends Laura and Tom and their friend Kelly, and we did a yard cleanup. It's looking semi-decent out there.

I astonished myself by cleaning up the small bed in the front by the lamp post. I dug out the weeds and planted the rest of the alyssum and white petunias to go with the deep red ones. I found a sack of seeds from 1989 (!) and spread some ancient alyssum seeds out in front, too. If they sprout, great; if they don't, that's fine too. (I have a TON more seeds of different kinds and I'm just going to spread them around and see what happens.)

Then I went out back and sat on a bucket, weeding out the completely overrun raspberry bed. I found a bunch of beach strawberries had put out runners everywhere and will probably cover that bed given time and relief from cleavers and dock. I didn't come close to finishing but it looks better than it did.

Going through the yard today, we found that the satsuma (planted in 2005) has set about 18 plums and the apples (late 2006) a dozen apiece. One of the gooseberry bushes is covered and there are currants on a couple of the bushes. Fun!

The part I'm most looking forward to is the bean house. We moved the girls' old swingset frame to a sunny patch and we're going to use it as an A-frame trellis that the girls can crawl inside. I just need some bean seeds. I'm going to plant sunflowers around it, too.

Then I came inside and collapsed for three hours.

But you know what? It was worth it.

I hope your Mother's Day was good, too.

St. Louis in the '20s. Bootleggers. Swells in top hats. Flappers with tails. And ears. No, not fox stoles--real ears and real tails.

This is a story of a St. Louis occupied entirely by cats.

Tracy J. Butler's Lackadaisy is a gorgeously illustrated net comic telling the story of Miss Maisy, the elegant owner of the Little Daisy Cafe. At least that's what's on the first floor; in the subterranean cave beneath the cafe is the swank speakeasy Lackadaisy. Butler's artwork is stupendous. The characters practically leap off the page. A fun, fun story, and I can't wait for the next installment. And this is from someone who generally speaking doesn't care for "funny animal" comix.

I have the place to myself. No car, but no kids and no hubby. Just a morning and probably part of an afternoon stretching out before me. John took the girls down to my mother-in-law's to pick up an old computer we're going to outfit with Ubuntu Linux for the girls. My mom was right, there's something very screwy about her old iMac; it may have been a lemon, because we can't get the thing to run fer nothin'.

This is my Mother's Day present, by the way, a day early because tomorrow the troops arrive for a garden cleanup and I'll be cooking and puttering all day. Now I am finishing up my morning rounds online and seriously pondering a trip down the street to a cafe with the paper. I rarely do that--I rarely leave the house, and even more rarely do I leave the house by myself.

Update: I hit Caffe Pallino and had cheese grits and scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee so big I couldn't finish it. I read the paper, cover to cover. Once I finish up my rounds here I'm considering a doze with Mr Patrick Tull reading Mr Patrick O'Brian on my iPod, carefully placed away from my heart.

Every weekday morning, now that I have the bedroom window open for the season, a young man on a bicycle has been my alarm clock. I don't know what he looks like or where he's going. But every morning around the same time he rides down the hill in front of our house. Some mornings, like today, he is singing, in a young, pleasantly raspy tenor--probably whatever's on his iPod at the time. Some mornings he's chatting with a young woman riding along with him. Some mornings he just goes "aaaaaaahhhh" and lets the vibrations from the road make his voice warble like a little kid.

I hope he's not a kid from the nearby high school, because that means in a couple of weeks he won't be waking me up. I'll miss him.

By now you are thinking I've gone round the bend. It's probably true. There's just a lot of good TV right now, it's weird! And my favorite of the bunch is "Heroes." It is SO good. It packs more into an hour than a lot of shows manage in an entire season. And so, my top five:

5. Santiago Cabrera is smokin'.

4. The guy with the incredibly long Indian name who plays Mohinder is smokin'.

3. Adrian Pasdar is smokin'. (Natalie Maines, you are a lucky, lucky woman.)

2. Milo Ventimiglia is smokin'.

and...

1. Present Hiro is adorable. Future Hiro is smokin'.

OK, this is a facetious list. No, actually, it's not. Except it is. There's a lot to love about "Heroes," and the main thing is, it's a genre show run by a guy who doesn't know genre but knows good TV, knows how to find good genre guys to work with him, and knows when to rein them in. Tim Kring--he's smokin'!

TNH's edition of "The American Frugal Housewife" from 1832 is now available in wire-bound paperback. It's $9.95 from CafePress. The ebook is available here at TNH for $1.95, 10% discount for members, 75% discount for subscribers. (Discounts don't apply to paperback editions.)

I've written here before about how inspirational I have found the Dervaes family of Pasadena, CA, which homesteads on a large city lot. Well, meet a new inspiration, No Impact Man, who is trying to live in extreme simplicity in New York City:

My wife Michelle and I decided, before jumping in at the deep end of this year-long project, to try no impact living as an experiment for a week. No garbage. No greenhouse gasses. No toxins. No water pollution. No air pollution. No electricity. No produce shipped from distant lands. No impact. Or so we naively hoped. ...

The fact is that if city dwellers can’t learn to live without reducing their ecological footprint then we’re in deep trouble because most of the world’s population now lives in cities. Saving the world can’t be left to the country bumpkins. It’s an urban problem. ...

In specific terms, the challenge is to take a year to develop and live a no impact lifestyle. Our approach will be to research our ecological options and run down our damage in one area at a time—solid waste, transportation, energy, for example. Our aim, over the course of the year, is to do no net harm to the environment. We’ll wind down in stages.

A brave experiment and engagingly written. I'll be watching them to see how they do.

I'm back live-blogging Dancing with the Stars, after taking last week off; the return of "Heroes" was more excitement than I could stand. And I'm going to miss the last 30 minutes of DwtS tonight too! Life! It is so unfair!

Laila looks good tonight with her best non-Latin dance so far. And she gets two tens!

Apolo and Julianne bring the major cuteness! And so does John Ratzenberger, though he's headed for the bottom two again and is my bet to get voted off tomorrow night, even though Billy Ray dances worse (and I think Ratzenberger wants off--this has got to be exhausting for a guy his age). Apolo gets lower than usual and John higher than usual scores.

Ian did better tonight--I loved the bit with Billy Ray--but he's not going to make the top three. He's just not getting it.

Billy Ray, I've fallen in love with him to my great surprise. The poor guy can't dance, but there's something very sweet about him.

And here comes Joey as the band does a Michael Jackson song as a standard--and it kinda works! Joey can pull off a top hat and cane better than anyone on the show. He's lost weight doing this, you can see it in his face. He's my current pick for winner.

And I'm going to miss the rest! Damn you, network counter-programmers and broken VCR!

Continuing with yesterday's theme: It's the DwtS Results Show! Apolo and Julianne danced even better tonight than they did yesterday. Macy Gray was weird. What's up with the golfing gloves? And America showed taste and kept John Ratzenberger! yay!

I was as surprised as the man himself when Billy Ray stayed out of the bottom two, and very surprised that Heather Mills didn't. But I wasn't at all surprised--I was relieved--that Clyde got voted off. He was awful, and he clearly wanted to go home. He's been phoning it in the last two weeks.

A fine family in our church is facing one of the worst crises I can think of. The father, Nick, has been battling cancer for a while now and has taken a turn for the worse, tonight.--read more

This is a tough thing for me to come out with. I mean, it runs so counter to what some of you might expect from me. But it's true, and I really need to come clean.

You see, I...I...boy this is hard...I love Dancing with the Stars. There. I said it. Oh that's a weight off my chest.

Now that I'm out, I'm going to start live-blogging it. After all it could be worse; I could have confessed to loving "The Bachelor." Follow me: