O' Oysters, come and walk with us! The Walrus did beseech...

You know how one day you are skimming along, suspecting nothing, and the next moment your canoe is in the water and all your supplies are getting wet? Well, that happened to us this week. John was laid off. And we live in Podunkville, East Texas, so this is pretty devastating to us actually. All of a sudden, I find myself seriously considering where else on the map we should be living. Perhaps these are decisions we have put off too long. I don't know. All I do know is that we don't want to go back to barely scratching out a living. Well, let me elaborate on that thought a little. We don't want to scrape by AND live in East Texas. In a grass hut in Fiji, yes. In the Ark-La-Tex, no. Hell no, even.

John and I came here ten years ago because real estate was cheap, and we felt we could live anywhere so long as we had each other. Believe it or not, we used to make steel wire sculptures for municipalities. John did most of the design and all of the manufacture part, and I went out and sold them to cities and small towns who were looking to dress up their squares and courthouse grounds, etc. It was fun, and occasionally (!) profitable. Here and there, John would pick up odd jobs and eventually he began doing remodeling projects, all with his unmistakably arty influence. We did an add-on one time that had a semi-circle wrap-around wall, all made of glass block. We did another, for a chi-chi little women's boutique, with these huge circus tents (for the dressing rooms) and fifteen foot tall columns with steel mesh flames coming out of the top. John designed and welded these crazy mannequins, with triangular curves and cast iron medallions for the heads. We did an elaborate, winding staircase at a large mausoleum here. More recently, he and I bought an old Victorian house in town, which had been badly burned. He rebuilt that staircase by hand, and he also made the master bedroom into a kind of treehouse, by vaulting the ceiling to cathedral height, then making a curtain wall of glass, looking out onto the huge oak tree there. When you are lying in bed, all you see is branch and sky.

In our own home, which we renovated ourselves, we have oil portraits of our daughters as winged angels painted on Greta's ceiling, with fluffy clouds all around. We painted the floor in Daria's room with baskets of fruit and lilies winding their way around the perimeter. I have handknitted the throw rugs. We dug a koi pond out back. Suffice it to say, that we both love for our environment to be entirely our own. Our financial situation has been tight at times, but we have always pulled through. This last job had been a kind of break from money stress and the myriad problems which are the hallmark of the self-employed. But now that job has evaporated, completely unexpectedly, and where do we go from here? In a way, the world is our oyster, ours' to conquer.

So why am I writing all this? Well, for one thing, it is our anniversary today and we both nearly forgot in the trauma and scramble of deciding what to do. But after eleven years and three children, all we really ask is for a quiet dinner and walk around downtown. Where do we go from here? Anywhere, so long as we have each other...

I'm B-A-ACK!

Hello, All! I am back from our trip to sunny California, but since we have been in Texas again, we have been dealing with sick kids (stomach bug -- bleh!). So I may be quiet a little while longer, but I am looking forward to reading all your blogs.

Leaving on a jet plane...

I am in the mad dash to the finish line now. All three girls have dance recitals this evening, after which we will drive two and a half hours to Dallas, stay overnight, get up before the birdies, and fly to LA. I will be out of the Blogosphere for the next couple of weeks, but I will be back with my head full of beach and sun, mountains and museums. Stay well!

"The trick is not minding that it hurts."

Here are my gorgeous (if I don't say so myself) daughters playing "Lawrence of Arabia" right before bedtime. It's one of my all-time favorite films, and who could blame me for making sure my girls love it, too? Actually, Daria was watching Extreme Engineering with her father, so she is the one sans headdress on the left. In the middle is Greta, and Lillian is on the right.

I got to see a wonderfully moving performance of a little group of singers from Sierra Leone over the weekend, and once I can get a minute to compose my thoughts, I intend to share my experiences here. It was one of those moments one is occasionally privileged to have, and I keep trying to relive little bits of it during the days that follow. Don't let it die, my spirit cries. I want to hold on to that feeling a while longer...

Come back to the five and dime, Rusty Pearl, Rusty Pearl

Well, it hasn't been even quite the whole weekend yet, and you are missed, Rusty Pearl! Wherever you are out there in Blogland, I hope you are well. Keep in touch!

Frick and Frack run a roadside drug bust

Brown Shoes has an interesting post on local crime, and it made me want to relate an incident we witnessed last summer. I live in the downtown area, on a fair amount of property (2-ish acres), and the whole back section of our lots are wooded. We are on the highest land in downtown, way up on a hill. One hot, hot day, on the weekend of a large festival held every year, John and I drove past a carnival of squad cars, whirling lights and a number of police officers, standing around. The center of their focus was an old beat-up VW van, replete with peace symbols, fuzzy dice ornaments, a Virgin Mary and a Grateful Dead sticker. Just like a Hollywood conception of the archtypical hippy ride. The most compelling thing about this little tableau was the huge mobile HAZMAT unit, with three or four men suited in 50's style, white jumpers and plastic hooded respirators. Clearly, they were "going in." Hmmmn, we thought to ourselves. Not a thing you see every day in a sleepy East Texas burb.

This whole scene was taking place not a full city block from our house, so John thought he'd walk down there and see what was up. Perhaps three minutes after he left, I glanced out my window and saw a cop running up my driveway, gun drawn. Two more officers followed, brandishing their weapons. Then I saw a non-uniformed man, with a German shepherd, come racing up the other side of my house.

I believe "Shit!" was the first thing out of my mouth, with the second being, "Get on the floor, girls! NOW!" As I lay there with my children, wondering if I was doing the right thing, I began to get angry. And frightened for John, who was out there, evidently in the middle of it. In fact, if he hadn't arrived a moment later, I probably might have gotten a lot more upset. As it was, I didn't have time because he ran in, out of breath, a combination of concern and disbelief on his face. He joined us for a short minute on the floor, then got up, swearing under his breath. A police officer, still with piece in hand, was peering in at us through our dining room window. John went over and shouted through the glass, "What should we do?"

"Just what you're doing!" he shouted back, then disappeared as John sat down again. He told us what he had seen and heard, while we waited for the police to give us the "all clear" sign. It turns out that during a routine traffic stop, the K-9 unit which happened to be in the squad car also happened to detect drugs in the VW van. They ran the driver's name, found he had some outstanding warrants, cuffed him and put him in the back-up squad car. As they began going over the vehicle, they found a sizeable amount of what appeared to be heroin stored inside the door. Rubbing their hands together with genuine glee, they summoned even more back-up and subsequently that enormous HAZMAT truck. Hello, Evening News!

It was a very hot day, so one officer moved the car with the suspect in it under a shade tree. He was supposed to stay with the guy, but gosh, how many people get to watch such a production every day, even when you're a cop? I mean, they were sawing the van in half now and camera crews were rumoured to be on their way. Who wants to miss a minute of that? So the officer in question found himself wandering closer to all the action. A period of time went by (5 minutes? An hour? I want to know!), and turning around, the officer noticed that the suspect was, uh -- gone. He had kicked out the window, crawled out a la Duke's of Hazard, and then fled on foot.

Now a handcuffed dude with rasta braids, a Grateful Dead t-shirt and bloody legs shouldn't get too far on a summer day, right? But they weren't sure how long he had been gone. Hence the ensuing panic we had just witnessed. I don't know how and when they ever caught up with him, but he wasn't in our yard.

This is frightening on so many levels...

Marmalade

Why cats enjoy life better than people do.