A better world?

Yesterday I was taking a walk and thinking about how I wanted to live in a different world this year - meaning I don't want to live in the publishing world so much this year, and I don't want to live in the cyberworld. I'm enjoying my blogging, but I find that most of the time I spent on the computer is NOT productive time. And when I get on the computer with the ambition to do something productive, I end up wasting time. Then I'm too tired to do something productive so I log off having accomplished nothing.

You would think my goal would be to put my computer time to better use, but alas, my goal is really to have less computer time all together.

Don't know how that's going to work out, but I'd like 2015 to be the Year of Good Health, not the year of blankly staring at the computer wishing I could get back on the writing train and start raking in the bucks that other people are raking in.

I spent this afternoon noodling around in my gardens. Added glass mushrooms to the terrariums to combat the melting the and mold that happen with the clay and resin ones.

I then fixed up my now non-living beach terrarium, inspired by the terrarium book I got for Christmas.

The pretty little starfish I had in there disintegrated, so I put a shell over the remains and tucked some dried moss in to look like something is growing.

Then I created another bottle garden - this one using the quilled plants that I made years ago. They used to be in the faux fairy garden I made, but that's getting tossed in favor of other real plants.

Now my real question for the day was this... Which is really the better world to live in? There's a lot of strife and argument between the people who live in the present and the people who want to live in the past. My question is, which makes a better world:

The commercialized present, where holidays are about retail sales, the seasons dictate what we buy and big business strives to keep us artificially happy by constantly providing us with new things to want and to need so that we work hard to have money to spend on things, things, things - and everything is shiny and bright and new and somewhat hollow... or

The 'idealized' past, where religion rules and tells us we must look askance and things that are new and commercial, where we should be working hard not to earn money but to earn our place in 'heaven' and government and church work to keep us artificially unhappy so that we are always striving to be better and more pious so we can attain our reward in the afterlife?

Is it better to be happily rushing off to the mall to pick up the latest tablet and video game and new flavor of shampoo that will give us shiny hair, or is it better to be trudging off to church or synagogue or mosque where we will be reminded that we are sinners who are worth nothing until we atone for something that supposedly happened centuries ago?

Is it better to pretend to be happy in a world with no sustenance, or is it better to be oppressed by a system that only allows us happiness when we're dead?

I know the latter isn't a world I want to live in - and really, neither is the former, but living on the fringe of both is rather frightening. Do you fall into the commercial present and be sucked into the next Black Friday or do you continue to resist the religious past where your soul is sucked out and sold back to you through prayer and atonement?

Maybe this is why I like to live in miniature world of my own creation.

Loot

I'm in one of those weird moods where I have a ton of stuff to do and I'm completely bored. To combat this, naturally, I went shopping and bought way too much stuff at JoAnn's.

 

I started by going crazy in the yarn aisle.

 

Then I was led to the fairy garden aisle where I also went a little nuts.

 

So many plans, so little ambition.

 

I did spend two days making this hat.

 

 

And that got me back into crocheting, now I'm out of control.

 

I have a Groot problem

I sometimes make the mistake of saying I like action figures a little too much, and then I get them as gifts.

Here's my collection of Groot figures. I do love Groot - in fact I adore Groot. So I suppose I can't complain.






I gave the figures a place of honor among my relocated terrariums. After rearranging my art supply closet and switching it with my office supply closet, I also moved some of my terrariums from my very crowded garden shelf to my desk where they won't get as much light, but they really shouldn't need as much. This should free up some room for my Norfolk Island Pine and the gardens I plan to add later in the new year. I have to be careful about how many plants I 'rescue' - I'm severely limited in my space. Hopefully the Groots will lend their support to my jar plants and help them grow.

A gardener's Christmas

Apparently there was a meeting at some point of people who wanted to find ways to combine the love of terrariums with the love of coffee. They were obviously thinking of me.

This is what I got from that collusion of geniuses:

A terrarium to grow coffee plants! And a coffee mug with terrariums on it. From two different people who apparently did not confer. I'm so excited to get started growing coffee. I'll have to add that to my crop list for 2015.

I also got myself some tiny gardening tools which should help me take care of my growing indoor garden and will make work in next year's fairy gardens a lot easier.

Now I should be able to root around in my tiny little plant homes and clean them up nicely. Off to the gardens. Now all I need is a pair of overalls! Or green jeans... [JK, I hate overalls and jeans.]

Merry Christmas!

Finally!

I've been working on this afghan for years! Though the pattern was easy to follow, and required no thought once it got started, I don't spend a lot of time crocheting anymore.

After carting this thing up and down the stairs for years, I finally said enough and got to the end.

 

 

Close-up!

 

Since I'm a glutton for punishment, I started a granny square pattern afghan in rainbow colors. We'll see how long that one takes me.

 

Just because you CAN

Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you should.  I probably just got myself into a Facebook flame war over the stupid movie controversy going on right now. {And I should know better than to enter into a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent, but sometimes I just can't let stupidity lie.]

Here's the sitch in a nutshell. A stupid group of actors and writers and directors made a stupid movie about the assassination attempt of a stupid [but still living] Asian dictator. Said Asian dictator found out about the stupid movie and got mad. [Not defending him, because he's an asshole, but really, who wouldn't get mad?] Cyber terrorists apparently strong-armed the movie company [Sony?] and threatened horrible things if the movie wasn't pulled. The stupid people pulled the movie.

Now the Internet is broken over whether or not they should have backed down and how they were just exercising their right to be assholes to free speech.

I gotta be honest - I hate asshole dictators as much as the next person. HOWEVER, I can see the merit in NOT making comedy movies about assassinating living political figures. It looks bad. It makes asshole dictators mad and while asshole dictators deserve to be mad, when they get mad, they can make things unpleasant for innocent people in ways the stupid movie makers never even imagined.

So crying that we have the right to free speech and we should be allowed to say whatever we want may sound like the rallying call of 'patriotic 'mericans' but really, it's the whine of the rampant moron. BECAUSE, just because you have the right to say whatever you want to say, DOESN'T MEAN YOU SHOULD. It's not always wise to run off at the mouth.

So while 'patriotic 'mericans' think that American filmmakers made a funny movie and some asshole dictator got mad and some cyber terrorists got involved and made the filmmakers pull the movie and that's so wrong -- what REALLY happened was, some brain dead American filmmakers made a stupid movie that made them look like a bunch of idiots and an asshole dictator got mad and some cyber terrorists strong-armed them into pulling the movie which they did, telling the world that these strong arm tactics may be used freely the next time some asshole dictator gets mad about something.

They made the US look bad and added fuel to the fire burning under a volatile political situation.

I call that treason. Other people - let's say...stupid people... call that 'freedom of speech.'

'nuff said.

On to more interesting things like my latest plant rescue.

Meet...Fiona. She's a Norfolk pine tree.

I found Fiona dressed in Christmas finery and languishing in the lobby of the local CVS pharmacy. She couldn't stand on her own. Her root ball was dry as a bone and falling out of the pot. They had spray painted glitter on her needles and hung some cheap ornaments on her branches and were selling her for $6.99.

I could not leave her there to die, so with a $4.00 coupon, I rescued her and took her home. She has a new pot and a spot of honor in my indoor garden where she should be able to soak up some much needed sunlight and enjoy the company of my other indoor plants. Wish her luck!

My indoor garden

 

Despite the lack of sunlight this season, my little indoor garden is managing to eek out a living in the only south facing window in the house. This bowl has parsley salvaged from the dismal outdoor plantings and some lethargic basil that I grew from seed. It also has some of the polka dot plant cuttings that are doing pretty well. You can see Nathan, my rescued aloe plant, in the background, still clinging to life now that he's been replanted in sand and marbles. Less water, more light seems to be helping him, but not much.

 

Here's the thatch house garden. The polka dot plants are second generation, since I cut the long stems off to make new plants I've gotten these more compact, leafier plants that look a lot better.

 

My plan for next winter is to replace some of these 'home made' plants with a couple of nice starter gardens from a plant store so I'll have something a little heartier to look at over the winter of 2015-2016.

 

Can't wait to get back out and work on my container garden for next spring.

 

I've narrowed my crops down to the following:

 

Parsley

Lettuce

Spinach

Garlic

Green Peppers

Jalapeños

Cucumbers

String Beans

Tomatoes

Strawberries

 

Ten crops - all fairly easy to grow. The garlic is already bedded down for the winter and I have Jalapeño seeds. I've decided rather than buy a pricey seed bank with a lot of stuff I'll probably never use, I'll just invest in some good quality seeds of the things I really know I'll use.

 

On the writing front, I did some editing and came up with a mini-plot for a new story. Maybe working on that for a bit will get the creative juices flowing. Two cups of coffee has revitalized my brain a bit, so we'll see.

Still makin' bacon

The new eating plan is still going great. I've never enjoyed eating more. It's so nice to finally feel in control of food, not the other way around.

If only I felt that way about my writing life. I'm on a down slope of the roller coaster again. All that feverish work on my new sci-fi and now, in the editing process I'm stalled. I'm bored. I'm so disillusioned with the industry and with just being on the computer at all, that I have no drive to do anything.

I miss the days when I really believed in what I was writing and I thought it was fun, instead of second guessing everything. There are so many writers out there just churning words onto a page and making bank - and I still agonize over how every word will be received. I thought removing the stress of deadlines would help, but it hasn't. The problem is, I want to be living life instead of writing. I find that all the things I used to find such guilt in - like cooking, cleaning the house, going out for the day - all the things I used to feel bad about doing because it meant I wasn't writing - those things are a lot more enjoyable now. I can relax and not feel bad about wasting time that should be devoted to writing and when I'm writing I feel like I'm wasting my time.

That's a problem. I think it stems from seeing so many people with their wild successes and still feeling like I have to work so much harder for so much less. Social media is a big problem to. There's some new thing called tsu that all the writers are flocking to - and I can't bring myself to go check it out. The last thing I want is one more time suck. I'm still orbiting Facebook though I haven't made any writing related posts in a long time and I don't intend to. Part of me wants to create a new on-line persona, but that means actually interacting with social media and caring what other people have to say on social media and there's this deep down part of me that keeps saying all this virtual interaction is not just a waste of time, it's a mockery of life. Go outside and LIVE. DO something, don't just post things. It's asinine. I really, really hate the thought of being on line all the time [she says while she's blogging.]

But I don't write this blog for feedback. I write it to put my thoughts down somewhere. To say what I need to say as a record of what I'm doing and what I care about. I thought of going back to Twitter as The Zen Clam, but what for? I'm not a diet guru - though I thought of maybe writing a cook book for people like me who don't have fancy ingredients and just want to make something quick and easy that tastes good. But what credentials do I have to write a cook book? Who is the Zen Clam? Does Zen Clam have a future on line? Does Zen Clam want a future on line? Do I want to police what I say because I'm afraid of how people will react to it? NO. I know I don't want that.

I just wish I knew what I did want - other than to plant my spring garden [wish it was spring] and get outside and enjoy the sunshine.

Oh, the life of a clam.