5 Random Things About Me

I like yellow cake with chocolate frosting best.

White cake is often dry.

Chocolate cake can be dry, but more often I just find it cloyingly sweet or overwhelmingly chocolate.

Marble cake is the worst of both white and chocolate cake.

Yellow cake seems to always be moist and chocolate frosting adds the perfect kiss of decadence.

Amusingly, my grammar checking program wants to make it yellowcake, which would be an entirely different kind of cake and about the only cake that I find worse than marble cake.

Little by little, I’m planting a Waking the Witch garden.

Oh, I tell people it’s an English Cottage Garden, but I’m choosing my plants specifically based on the lyrics of Kate Bush’s Waking the Witch.

I have red and white and purple pinks and Fuschia peonies the color of the background of Kate’s picture on the cover of Hounds of Love to go into posies. I have lavender (of course), salvia for healing, black hellebore (Lenten roses), and black irises.

This year I got my red, red roses as one of my garden based birthday presents.

They’re supposed to bloom all summer, and they sure seem to be giving it a good showing so far. for things. With any luck, these will be summers of roses for the rest of my life.

When I was a child, I wanted to be Batman when I grew up.

Not as a job, mind you. Just as a thing I did in my spare time for fun, I guess. I mean, Bruce Wayne’s actual job was running a technology company. That said, there were many other reasons I couldn’t be Batman aside from the fact that Batman is a fictional character, not the least of which was my unenviable lack of grace and athleticism. I was once held in at recess for a month in elementary school so the gym teacher could do remedial gym with me; I’m just that graceful.

My mom encouraged everything she could to try to remedy the problem. Dance classes through a summer program for Talented and Gifted Children to expose them to the arts. Gymnastics lessons as part of intermural sports league. Modeling lessons with a friend of the family who had some background in it (I guess) because that friend needed child models for a local show.

All of it helped, and I loved all of it. but I never got anything resembling “good” at any of it. I became adequate at best. Somewhat less likely to trip over a color change in the carpet and black both of my eyes because I hit the only nearby object in the room at an odd angle.

Given time and practice, I might have achieved more, but that’s the kicker: There just wasn’t the time because all of those things cost more money than our family could reasonably spend on something that wasn’t actively keeping food on the table and a roof over our heads.

It didn’t ever occur to me that I couldn’t be Batman because I was a girl.

I don’t remember learning to crochet.

I remember crocheting, but not how I learned to do it. It’s fallen out of my memory. I guess my first project was a “Hot Pad” (read: Swatch) that my maternal grandmother used for years after I made it.

My favorite project to make was a stuffed toy octopus that would probably be called an amigurumi, but this was long before amigurumi “hit” in the United States. It had a single crochet body and its legs were curly double crochet spirals that also made fun bookmarkers.

I made as many of those bookmarkers as my mom would give me yarn to use up, usually scraps from her own projects. I gave them to friends or people who I wanted to be my friends. Really, I’d give them away to anyone who seemed to be reading a book and would take one. Sometimes people would take one and throw it away later when I wasn’t looking, and I found more than one of my bookmakers in the trash at school.

I don’t have words to describe the betrayal and pain I felt when that happened. I wanted people to be my friends more than anything in the world. People, it seemed, didn’t want me for a friend.

My current favorite thing to crochet now is “things for around the neck” (scarves, shawls, cowls) because I have had arthritis in my neck since my 30s and it hurts when it gets cold. I’m very picky about who I give my craft projects to now. Crafting, especially crochet, is my biggest creative outlet these days, a gift of my life that I used to turn yarn into something useful. I’d rather not squander it on someone who won’t appreciate the gift.

I’ve always wanted to be a “real writer”

A real writer who makes a living writing books.

It’s the earliest thing I can remember wanting to be when I was little. I would write and illustrate storybooks for fun. In school, my writing was how I was identified as a “Talented and Gifted” child and was given access to opportunities that other students didn’t get despite the fact that they would have benefitted from them.

I studied English literature at the University. One of my endorsements was in non-fiction and creative writing. I’m never quite as happy doing anything else as I am when I’m writing.

I’m over 50 now. I still don’t make my living as a writer. I haven’t been published (beyond my own blog) in over 15 years. Somehow, I’ve gone terribly wrong along the way.

Figuring out how I change that is my theme for my next trip around the sun.