Another Thursday :-) These are the things on my mind today – and WP isn’t playing nice with me, so I’m going with a slightly different format:
FIRST: Sweet Baby Jesus, PLEASE let this horrendous smoke/air quality move along. All week Chicagoland has had the worst air on the planet (I’m not kidding), due to the smoke from the Canadian wildfires. Here’s a look yesterday to today. We’ve been in the purple since Tuesday, which is bad enough, but 285 is perilously close to to the brown Hazardous category. Thankfully the number has started to come down (we’re actually now down to 163 (!) at least we’re in the red today . . . ) and I just got a severe thunderstorm warning on my phone, so I’m crossing my fingers that that will help.
I know that wind is what will really move the smoke out, but rain has to help, at least a little, anyway. The scale index is on the bottom right of the photo. This is the AirNow app, from the EPA. If you or someone you love has asthma or other respiratory issues, this app is a godsend. It’s available for both iOS and Android and it’s free.
SECOND: As part of my year of Self-Care, I’m going to get my colors done. Well, done again :-) Anyone else have theirs done back in the 80s when it was the thing to do? I was a Winter. There’s a new system, and I’m really looking forward to my appointment as part of helping myself move forward and feeling better about myself in the process :-) Self-Care for the win!!
THIRD: I have my next cross stitch project picked out for July Summer Cross Stitch Camp! I’m going with Sheep Heap, from Plum Creek Samplers. I’ll have a photo soon :-)
This air quality has been really awful and I can only imagine how much worse it has to be up in Canada, where my local news tells me that 29,000 acres have burned . . . . I’ve been indoors for the past few days and still I find myself coughing in the house. Have to leave you with this funk gem from the 70s. I spent a lot of time on the dance floor getting down to this tune.
This is something that author, Joan Anderson, asks in her wonderful books. It’s something I have asked myself a lot over the years since I discovered her work. This thought and the results of a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test have been swirling around in my head since Thursday. I realize that no test is 100% accurate, but my results were startlingly accurate in their description of me. I’m an INFJ-T, called The Advocate. They say that INFJ is the rarest personality type in the world, occurring in only 1-3% of the population and that we often feel like we don’t fit in (oh, hello my entire childhood). As a kind of funny aside, I was looking this up and in Star Wars, the INFJ characters are Obi Wan Kenobi and Yoda. :-D
The topic of roles came up again – pretty much accidentally – in a particularly insightful hour with my therapist last week. We were talking about my lifelong struggle with the size of my ass and I mentioned how I had kept myself safe as a kid. Sports were not a thing for me. I was not at all athletic (which makes it so much more surprising that I lift weights now and love it). I was always the last kid chosen for any team. I was bullied because I was taller and physically larger than most of the kids in my class, boys included until they had their growth spurts in high school. I mean, I came from sturdy Irish stock on my mom’s side, and my dad was 6’4″ tall. It’s no surprise that I was taller and larger.
I mentioned to my therapist that fat kids always make the joke first. Particularly fat girls who wore glasses – and, in my case, fat, glasses, and always the new kid. New kids were a natural target and unless you had something that you did really, really well (usually sports of some kind) the bullying could be relentless. I was musical – which was cool, but not cool enough to save me from being chubby, wearing glasses, and always being the new kid. Kids like me always made fun of ourselves first – before someone else did. It was a way of holding on to some sort of control in any given situation. I mean, if I was laughing at myself or making a joke at my own expense before someone else had the chance to do so – beat them to the punch, as it were – it took the wind out of the other kids’ sails and the bullying sometimes let up for a bit.
And my therapist said, “Oh, you wore a mask.”
A light bulb went on in my head.
“I’m still wearing a mask,” I said.
When I took the 16 Personalities test I linked above, I found myself saying things like, “wait, that’s how I used to respond, but is that how I respond now?” over and over. If you were to meet me in real life you would think that I am an extroverted, carefree spirit. But if I let you get to actually know me (which doesn’t happen all that often) you would know that that extroverted, carefree spirit is a major part of the mask I wear to keep myself safe – because, unfortunately, I never learned how to be myself without it. Most kids learn how to let the mask go and be their authentic selves at some point growing up. I never did.
There is such a sense of loss and shame attached to this for me. How many years wasted behind a mask? How much I must have felt that I had to hide who I truly am, even from those who loved me most. I firmly believe, however, that losing my father at a very early age cemented that mask onto my face. My little kid brain couldn’t process a loss of that magnitude, but as I have looked back on it as an adult, I can see that I was always good. I never got in trouble. Somehow, I’m sure my little brain thought that I was responsible for my dad going away and never coming back. Reasonably sure that I did everything in my little kid power to ensure that my mom wouldn’t go away, too. I mean, my little kid brain thought it must have been my fault, right? And I certainly wanted to hold on to my mom, because as much as I loved my Gramma, she was old, and the other person in our household was a family member (long dead now) who was abusive to me (mainly emotionally). You bet I was keeping myself safe – and in my own little mind doing everything right so that my mom wouldn’t go away, too. I never talked about it growing up, but I was keeping myself safe in the only way I knew how – by creating a mask of perfection.
Little kids don’t have the capacity to understand life-altering losses when they are toddlers. And therapy then wasn’t what therapy is now. I’m sad that I felt I had to make a mask to keep myself safe. But I honor that little girl. How amazing that she – I – did the best I could even then! There is sadness that it has taken me this long in my life to gain a better understanding of what I went through as a child. But there it is. I can’t change the past, but I can keep moving forward. For now, the mask is in my hand – because, you know, I might need it. But it’s not on my face. I’ll hold it for awhile – sort of the way that I still keep a KN95 mask with me because of COVID concerns. I don’t wear it all the time anymore, but it’s there if I feel I need it.
I love how we move forward in our worlds. How we learn. How we grow. How we embrace each piece of our lives as they unfold. How we begin to understand ourselves. How did I know that I would need This is Me as my theme song for 2023? I can’t answer that – but my insides knew. My spirit knew, even if I was not consciously aware of it, that this would be an important year for me. And here we are, halfway through it. And here I am with a giant piece of understanding.
Who are we beyond the roles that we play?
All I can tell you, is that this, is me.
I still cry every time I hear Keala Settle belt this out.
Thought I would share some of the other stuff that happened on my trip to Atlanta. Before I even got to the expressway here, I was at a light that I pass through regularly – except this time, while I had the green, someone ran the red and there was almost an accident. I managed to stop in time, but I’m guessing that the other person got a ticket-in-the-mail, because this particular intersection has a notorious red-light camera.
I caught my breath, thanked God and my angels for keeping me and my car (and my plants) safe, and headed for the expressway again. The first leg of my trip was a night with my stepson in Nashville. As some of you may know, I have a bit of a checkered past where GPS is concerned. I used to have a TomTom with lifetime free maps, and it was mostly great until they made it obsolete . . . Lifetime my ass.
Anyway, I’ve used the GPS in my car but it’s old and relatively useless. I’ve been trying to use the GPS on the Maps app and/or Google Maps app on my phone. These work with only some regularity for me. I have not found a way to get them to reliably TALK OUT LOUD to me. Sometimes they will, but most of the time they won’t, which makes it a bit challenging. As mentioned, my car has GPS, but it hasn’t been updated since 2014 when I bought the car. In subsequent model years Subaru set up the GPS so that you could put your chip in a card reader, plug it in to your computer, and automatically get updated maps. Mine, however, requires me to buy a new chip card for every update, and they cost $200 bucks a pop. Yeah, no.
So I was stumbling along with my phone app, and I had initially put in “Nashville” as my destination to get myself onto the correct major road, which really is just I-65 South. It was also talking to me – maybe because I had set it up that I was listening to a podcast while driving – I’m not sure, but it was talking to me so I was grateful. When I began to get closer to Nashville, I pulled off to gas the car, pee, and put my stepson’s address into the GPS. I got back on the road and my GPS took me into the city and had me get off the expressway near the Nissan Stadium (where the Tennessee Titans play) in downtown Nashville.
I was stopped at a light, and looking around it seemed pretty clear that I was not in a great neighborhood. The light changed, but the car in front of me didn’t move. I honked the horn. No motion. I honked again. Nothing. I pulled around into the next lane to go around, but by this time the light was red again. I looked over to give the driver the side-eye, and saw that he was slumped over at the wheel. I honked again. No response.
I had to wait for the light to change – which seemed to take for fricking ever, but it did change and I pulled into a gas station across the street to safely call 911. They sent both fire and ambulance “lights and sirens,” and they were there pretty quickly. Although the 911 operator said I could leave – I waited, and I tried to catch their attention when they arrived. They never saw me waving and pointing, but I saw them as they put blocks in front of the car’s wheels and then further assessed the situation. I saw the passenger door open. And then they were packing up and driving on. Odd, but, whatever – I had done what I thought I needed to do, which was call for help.
I started my car and followed my GPS – and at the next light, the guy who had been slumped over and non-responsive passed me and went on his merry way! I’m guessing that he simply fell asleep at the light . . . I was like, REALLY???? And then I realized I truly was in downtown Nashville and I didn’t think that my stepson lived in downtown Nashville. The route on my phone “ended” and the app then asked me did I want to continue to my next destination, which was my stepson’s address. I’m really not clueless where tech is concerned, but I didn’t realize that I should have deleted the previous instructions to “Nashville” when I put my son’s address in. Yeah. So I told it yes, and it took me back onto to the expressway and on to my stepson’s.
I often wonder why things happen the way they do. I guess if that guy had really had a heart attack (which is what I thought had happened) I would have been in the right place at the right time. Being a city girl, however, I did NOT get out of my car to attempt to render aid – for all I knew it could have been a trap. A single woman alone cannot be too careful – particularly in an unfamiliar city. The rest of my journey was uneventful and although there was a parking SNAFU at the hotel, everything got figured out.
I had a free morning on Thursday, and one of the things that I most wanted to see in Atlanta hadn’t been on any of the tours that were offered during convention: The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Park. I’m sort of a National Park geek. I’ve not been to very many, but it’s been one of my retirement plans to see as many of them as I can. I have the Collector’s Edition Passport To Your National Parks book, and all the annual stamp series. I take it with me whenever I travel in case there is a National Park that I can stop to see. I just updated it this morning with extra pages and the National and Regional stamps for the past three years.
If you are ever in Atlanta, I highly recommend that you visit the MLK Jr. park. The only building that I did not see was his birth home. It’s by tour only, and I could have gotten on a tour later in the afternoon, but I needed to get back to the hotel. So I watched the short film in the visitor center, saw the museum, the Peace Rose Garden, the new Ebenezer Baptist Church (where Senator Raphael Warnock is the pastor), Freedom Hall, and the eternal flame and MLK, Jr.’s and his wife’s resting places. The place I most wanted to see was the old Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. King’s actual church that he co-pastored with his father from 1960 to his assassination in 1968. It’s been closed off and on for renovation, and the website wasn’t clear if it was open – but when I got into the visitor center it said it was open.
I made my way there and went inside and sat for awhile.
There was a recording of one of Dr. King’s sermons playing. It was very moving to be there, resting in this place. I prayed there. I was really interested in the hymn numbers that were on the hymn boards.
I looked, but there were no hymnals in the pews so I asked one of the Rangers about the hymn numbers. He couldn’t find the information, but emailed me later that day with a sheet of information about the hymn boards. Of course, NOW, when I want to actually write about them, that email is nowhere to be found – even after an extensive search. I do recall that they were from a specific Sunday, and that the hymnal was the Baptist Hymnal that was published in 1956. A little sleuthing turned up what I needed:
54 – God of Our Fathers
188 – Amazing Grace
237 – Lord I’m Coming Home
268 – All The Way My Savior Leads Me
The only one of these that I was not familiar with was #237, Lord I’m Coming Home. God of Our Fathers has always been in the Reformed tradition as far as I know and is one of my personal favorites. Pretty much everyone knows Amazing Grace. All The Way My Savior Leads me is not my favorite Fanny Crosby hymn (that would be Blessed Assurance), but I am at least familiar with it. I suppose only a singer/musician would want to know about the hymns on the hymn board :-)
Anyway, this was a serious highlight of my trip and I was very glad to have been able to go inside.
I headed home to Chicagoland on the weekend of the Strawberry Moon. I didn’t see it when it was full on Saturday night, June 3rd, but this is from first light on Monday morning, June 5th, as I was getting back on the road after I had to stop the previous night in central Indiana (about an hour south of Indy) not because I was tired, but because I couldn’t see well.
The average age of cataract surgery is 73 years old. In my family, however, we get them in our 50s. It’s a genetic thing, I guess. So it’s already been about a decade since I had surgery for them. I see amazingly well post-op, except for at night. Around Chicagoland that’s not really a big deal because every expressway in the Chicagoland area is lit very well, but in central Indiana there aren’t any streetlights and it’s fricking black as coal, even on a night shortly after the full moon. I was only about four and a half hours from home, but safety won out and I got off and got a hotel room when I realized I could not keep driving at 45 mph on an expressway in the dark. It just wasn’t safe. But when I woke at first light, I got to see this beautiful, almost-still-full moon.
Even after having slept and after grabbing some breakfast on the road, I was very, very tired that morning as I continued on the last leg of my journey home. I was doing everything to stay awake, and was very glad to get off the expressway and on to the local streets near my home. I pulled into my garage at 9:29 that morning. I got the plants in and unloaded the rest of the car. I sat down for just a minute to have a glass of water and a snack at a few minutes after 10 a.m., and I woke up four hours later. I was so tired that I never even made it to my bed – just conked out in my chair!
This was my first real trip since before the pandemic. I had a wonderful time and it was surely momentous for me, but it was also the first time I was in a large group of people since before COVID. It was a lot to process, I think.
Again, if you’re ever in Atlanta do go to the MLK, Jr. National Historic Park. You won’t regret it. :-)
Decided to leave you with this version of the one hymn I didn’t recognize, from an early lineup of Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives.
This is Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives – Lord I’m Coming Home
I read that in a catastrophic implosion at great depth in the sea, complete destruction would take about 1/20th of a second. I sure hope that’s true and that the five souls who perished, perished instantly with no knowledge or understanding of what was happening.
In an exceptionally good hour with my therapist, I made a pretty major breakthrough that I’ll be writing about soon.
I was notified today that the Wipe Out! wipes that I purchased during the pandemic are now subject to a class action lawsuit because apparently the manufacturer allegedly “deceived low-income consumers into thinking its wipes were safe to use on surfaces in their homes when it did not have regulatory approval for the pesticides in the products . . . ” Oh, great. I have one tube left of them – I figured I use them up. But I’ll toss them now, and buy some Clorox wipes tomorrow.
This song has been in my head lately. It’s a country song that you just have to listen to – not the usual formulaic stuff that the country machine often pumps out. Enjoy.
My last longer post was on May 20th. Time began to compress the closer I got to the national African violet convention. It was held this year from May 29th to June 3rd in Atlanta, Georgia. I had had plants on the pre-show schedule for the previous three months but I felt like they weren’t really at their best. Everything seemed to have low bloom count to me, but I packed myself and them up (13 of them) and drove them to Atlanta. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.
I entered the show on Tuesday evening, and then, even though I was working in the showroom on Wednesday, I never checked on them. I hoped that more blossoms would open by Thursday morning when the plants were judged.
I took an assortment this year – mostly standards, but also a couple of semiminiatures and some cousins of the African violet – two streptocarpus and a s. petrocosmea kerrii, the latter grown for foliage only (in this instance. I had hoped to have a Standard Collection, which is three registered plants all of the same type. For me, that would be standards, but some of my other standards just did not cooperate this year and were low enough on bloom count that I knew that even if more buds opened by judging that there wouldn’t be enough to be a blue ribbon plant.
One of the plants that I took with me – actually three of the plants – was a hybrid called Handy Dandy. It’s special to me because two years ago I identified that a plant hybridized by the late Kent Stork (he was a well-known hybridizer and he and his wife were/are good friends of mine) had sported. African violets do this from time to time. To sport means that the plant changes in some way. African Violet Society of America shows account for this and have a class called Sports and Mutants in every national show. Local shows can also include this class in their show schedules. Anyway – you want a sport to be an improvement over the original plant. It doesn’t always happen that a sport is an improvement, though, and in that case you would toss the plant because it no longer blooms true to its description. So – I didn’t physically hybridize the original plant, Kent did. Its name was Mandan Dandy. He used to name a lot of his plants with names honoring the many local Native American tribes in the Nebraska area where Kent and Joyce used to live.
I had found leaves of Mandan Dandy, a plant with single – semidouble coral blossom with Kent’s signature dark green, symmetrical foliage. I was happy to get this plant into my collection. This was in 2019. I propagated it from a leaf and it grew well for me. I potted up a strong baby plantlet, and by January 2020 it was ready to bloom. To my surprise, it bloomed full double. So you understand the difference, here is a page that shows both types and shapes of African violet blossoms.
A double pinkish-coral blossom was a definite improvement over the original plant, and so I decided to grow this plant out through three generations to see if this sport was a true, stable sport. It was. It took two years of work to do it, but last winter I gave it a name – Handy Dandy (the “Dandy” a nod to the original plant) – and put in the paper work to have it registered with the African Violet Society of America. Because I recognized Mandan Dandy had sported and I did the work to grow it out and stabilize it, I am considered Handy Dandy’s hybridizer.
I took three plants of Handy Dandy to the national show and entered it in three different classes: Sports and Mutants; Unusual Container; and its Color class. If I’d had a collection, I would have entered a forth one there! The most important one, though, was the one entered in the Sports and Mutants class. I hoped against hope that it would at least get a blue ribbon. African violets are judged on the merit system. That means that every plant in a class is initially judged on its own merits, which means there could, potentially, be multiple blue ribbon plants in one class. It becomes competitive when one is chosen Best in Class.
At the awards banquet I was stunned to be called up with the final group of winners. I thought there must have been some mistake made. I was like, why are they calling me up?? My plants had been marginal, at best, with low bloom count. But what I had crossed my fingers for had happened: from Tuesday night to Thursday morning more blossoms had opened on all of my entries. I won 5 Best in Class awards and the Best Jersey Snow Flakes (a white-blossomed variety that grows well for me).
And then, the Awards Chair said that I won Best New Cultivar in the Amateur Horticulture Division with Handy Dandy (got a big rosette!); and THEN she said that Handy Dandy had also won the Best New Cultivar in the show for 2023 (got a beautiful black leather plaque with the seal of the Society on it). Not only did Handy Dandy get the blue class ribbon that I had hoped for, it got Best in Class, Best New Cultivar Amateur Division and Best New Cultivar in the Show, a highly coveted award that usually only goes to a commercial grower. I was overwhelmed and thrilled and happy and ugly crying all at the same time. There had been two sports in the Commercial Division of the show, but Handy Dandy took top honors.
Terrible photo of me (head sweating and I had just finished ugly crying), but here is Handy Dandy – there are actually two in this photo. The one that looks like it’s sitting on top of the plaque is in the Unusual Container Class.
Here’s a closer look.
Here are the two main awards.
Then to add the cherry on top, I became a Master Judge last Saturday. I’ve been some level of AVSA judge for more than 20 years. First a Student Judge, then Advanced Judge, then Senior Judge. Master Judge is the highest level. Many years ago I bought some Master Judge pins (no longer available) with the hope that some day I would eventually get to that level. Last Saturday was that day. :-)
So yeah, you know, best African violet convention of my entire life. !!! I can’t imagine ever topping this one. I celebrated the next evening with some Prosecco and a good dinner with my friends.
It’s taken me all week to decompress from this trip – laundry, exploding the suitcase, getting the show plants isolated – and I just finished repotting some of the show plants this morning. I should be able to put the kitchen back to rights this afternoon :-D I DVRd a show on PBS while I was away. It was a Cinemax special filmed in September 1987 called Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night. I love Roy Orbison – well, who doesn’t love Roy Orbison?? It’s well worth seeing (although you do have to endure Jackson Brown chewing gum with his mouth open . . . . Really, Dude??) This tune was played, but here is the original. Enjoy :-)
Last week was a wild one and I’m working on a post to catch you up. In the meantime, here are three things on my mind this Thursday.
The smoke from the Canadian fires has made it to Chicagoland. Really glad I have the AirNow app from the EPA to be checking the Air Quality Index (AQI) in my area. We’re in the orange at the moment, which means I’m indoors.
The African violet convention last week was probably the best convention – for me – of my entire life.
My exercise habit is holding well – I even went to the gym in the hotel twice last week!
There is a lot to share, so look for some more posts soon!
You Guys, this man is 83 years old and he still sounds pretty fricking amazing. This is live from May of this year. Tune starts at about 1:30 in. Enjoy :-)